Liesel — Sanctara
The helmet smelled like someone else's head.
That was my first problem. My second problem was that it was too big, so every time I nodded, it nodded a moment later, like an echo with opinions.
My third problem was my sister.
Cordelia walked down the line of the escort with her hands clasped behind her back. She did everything that way: slowly, thoroughly, and like she was already disappointed.
I stood very straight. I held my spear the way the guard beside me held hers. I tried very hard to look like someone who had never been called "Your Highness" in her life.
Don't look at her. Guards don't look at princesses. Guards look at the middle distance.
I looked at the middle distance. There was a pigeon in it. It looked back.
This had all started three days earlier, in the stables, where I'd been hiding from a dress fitting.
"The First Princess is riding to Greymark," one of the grooms said, brushing down Cordelia's gray mare. "All the way to the border."
"What for?" asked the other.
"To look at a boy."
I sat up so fast I hit my head on a saddle rack.
A boy. A young man. A Saint, if the palace gossip was right, and palace gossip was right about half the time, which was more than I could say for most things in the palace.
Not counting Father, I'd met exactly three men in my life, all of them at my Welcoming Age celebration. One talked about himself for an hour. One asked whether my dowry was bigger than my sister's. One fell asleep in his soup.
None of them had ever healed anybody. None of them had ever done much of anything.
And Cordelia, who had met more young men than anyone in the kingdom and liked none of them, was going to ride across half of Octavia to see one.
Without me.
So I did the only reasonable thing.
I borrowed a spare set of armor from the barracks storeroom, along with a guard's tabard: crimson, with the gold star of the Eight beneath its crown on the chest. I stuffed my hair up into the helmet, which took four tries and most of my patience. My gold hairpin went into my boot, for luck.
Golden hair and green eyes. Every woman in my family had them, and every person in the capital knew it. The helmet took care of both.
It was, if I said so myself, a perfect disguise.
Now Cordelia stopped.
Right in front of me.
My heart tried to climb out through the visor.
"Your helmet's crooked," she said.
I straightened it. It nodded late.
"Name?"
My mind went perfectly, beautifully blank. There were thousands of names in the kingdom. I'd had three whole days to pick one.
"...Beth."
Beth. As in Elisabeth. As in the name I'd hated since I was old enough to hear it.
My own mouth had betrayed me.
Cordelia looked at me for a long moment.
Then the corner of her mouth moved.
It wasn't much. On anyone else, you wouldn't even call it a smile. But I'd watched my sister through eighteen years of banquets, ceremonies, and visiting dukes, and Cordelia did not smile. Not at compliments. Not at jokes. Not at the lord who once read her a poem with forty verses.
"Beth," she repeated.
"Yes, Your Highness."
"Try to keep up, Beth."
Then she moved on down the line.
I let out a breath I'd been holding since the stables.
She didn't recognize me. Eighteen years of sharing a breakfast table, and my own sister walked right past me.
Whatever the smile was about, it wasn't me. The weather, probably. Or taxes. Something dull that only Cordelia would find funny.
At the head of the column, the escort captain rode up beside her with a sheet of paper and a frown.
"Your Highness, the roster shows one more rider than—"
"Then the roster's wrong," Cordelia said. "Fix it."
The captain looked at the paper. Then at Cordelia. Then, very carefully, at nothing at all.
"...Yes, Your Highness."
Lucky, I thought. Extremely lucky.
Horns sounded from the walls. The great gates of Sanctara swung open, and the banners above them snapped in the wind: a gold lioness on crimson, sword upright, the star of the Eight shining over her head.
I'd seen those banners every day of my life. I'd never once ridden out under them without forty people telling me where to stand.
The road stretched ahead, all the way to the border. Somewhere at the end of it was a boy who could close wounds with his hands.
I grinned so hard my helmet slipped again.
Nobody noticed. That was the beauty of a disguise.
Fabian — Greymark
"Sixteen, Young Master," Captain Sigrid said.
The White circle faded under my palm. The farmer's thumb was whole again, just a pale pink line where the cut had been.
She flexed her hand, thanked me three times, and tried to give me a basket of eggs.
Sigrid took the eggs. Sigrid took everything people tried to give me. I was starting to suspect she had a room somewhere just for eggs.
I waited for the dizziness.
There it was. A small tilt at the edges of the world, like the courtyard had leaned in for a closer look.
"That's all for today," I said, loud enough for the line to hear.
The people still waiting groaned, but it was a friendly groan. Greymark knew the rules by now. The Young Master heals until the Young Master gets dizzy, and then three knights, every one of them taller than him, make sure he goes inside.
"Tomorrow, Young Master!"
"Tomorrow," I promised.
I walked back toward the house with the count rattling around in my head.
Sixteen.
A week ago, it had been fourteen. On my first day, eleven.
I'd been telling myself I was getting better at it. Like my morning swings. Do something enough times and it gets easier. That was just how the world worked.
Except spells don't get cheaper with practice. Everyone knows that. I'd known it for weeks. I just hadn't wanted to think about it very hard.
Today, I thought about it.
「Heal」 wasn't getting any cheaper. Every cast felt exactly the same: one small splash from the pitcher in my chest. Today's sixteenth splash was exactly the size of my first.
The splashes weren't getting smaller.
The pitcher was getting bigger.
That's not a thing, I told myself.
Then I remembered how many times this month I'd said that about things that turned out to be very much a thing.
"Sixteen," Hana said at dinner.
She had a little notebook open beside her plate. She was writing in it.
I put my spoon down. "Are you counting?"
"I count everything about you." She said it the way other people say the sky is blue. "Your meals. Your naps. You sneezed four times on Tuesday."
"That's—"
"Four, Fabian."
Marika stabbed a potato. "You got dizzy later today."
I looked at her. "You felt that?"
"I feel everything. It's awful." She stabbed the potato again, though it was clearly already dead. "You stubbed your toe yesterday and I almost rode into a ditch."
"So you've been keeping track too."
"I have not." The tips of her ears started going pink. "The bond just has a very... annoying memory."
Naomi hadn't said anything yet. She was watching me with the look she used on maps before a patrol.
So I told them. The splashes. The pitcher.
When I finished, Naomi set down her fork.
"Pools don't grow."
"Mine is."
"Father's never did." She said it quietly. "He told me once. A mage's pool is a well. You learn to draw from it better. You don't dig it deeper."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Father's old seat at the end of the table sat empty, the way it had for ten years.
Then Naomi stood.
"Reading room. After dinner."
Marika groaned. "Books."
"Books."
"I just got back from the east road. My brain is tired."
"Your brain," Naomi said, "has never once been tired."
Hana closed her notebook and tucked it into her apron pocket, right next to her tin of salve.
"I'll make tea," she said. "It's going to be a long night."
The reading room smelled like old paper and candle wax, the way it always had.
It had been Father's favorite place. Some nights, I could still picture him in the big chair by the window, a book open on his knee, pretending not to notice four children sneaking in past bedtime.
Tonight, the four of us snuck in on purpose.
Hana took Records of the Saints of Elysia. Naomi pulled down a stack of Father's old books on mana and mages, the thick, dull ones with no pictures. Marika got the leftovers.
I got a chair and instructions not to touch anything that might fall on me.
"I'm seventeen," I said.
"You're short," Marika said. "Shelves are tall. It's simple math."
Agnes came in around the second hour with a fresh pot of tea and a disapproving face.
"Not past midnight, my lady," she told Naomi.
"Past midnight," Naomi said, without looking up.
Agnes sighed the sigh of a head maid who had lost this argument many times before. She left the tea. She also left four extra candles, which said more than the sigh did.
For a while, there was nothing but the sound of pages.
Then Marika started reading out loud.
"'Mana fatigue,'" she announced. "'Mild cases bring dizziness. Severe cases may result in death.'" She looked up. "Did you know that?"
"Yes."
"Did you know it in red ink?" She turned the book around. The last line was, in fact, written in red.
"Sis Marika."
"Red ink, Fabian. Somebody thought this was important enough for red ink."
"I stop when I'm dizzy. Every time."
"You'd better." She went back to reading. A minute later, I heard her mutter "red ink" again, to herself.
Hana turned her pages slowly, one Saint at a time. Sometimes her finger stopped on a line, and her lips moved, and then she shook her head and moved on.
Naomi read the way she read reports from the border: fast, then slow, then fast again, with a small frown that never quite went away.
The candles burned down. Agnes's extra ones got lit. Somewhere past midnight, Marika fell asleep with her face in a book about mana circles, and Hana put a blanket over her without looking up.
At last, Hana closed the Records.
"Nothing," she said softly. "Not one Saint. Not one line. Some of them healed more people as they got older, but only because they learned which wounds needed them most."
Naomi closed her book too. "Nothing here either. Every one of them says the same thing."
"Wells don't grow," I said.
"Wells don't grow."
Marika lifted her face off the page. There was a crease across her cheek. "Mine says that too," she mumbled. "Three times. Like the writer was annoyed someone even asked."
We sat there in the candlelight, four people and a pile of very certain books.
"So what does it mean?" I asked.
"It means," Naomi said, "that nobody outside this room hears about it."
Hana's hands tightened around the Records. "What if it's dangerous? What if it's growing because something's wrong?"
That one landed harder than I expected. I hadn't thought about it like that.
"I feel fine," I said. "Better than fine, honestly."
Naomi closed her eyes for a moment. I felt it then, the small brush of her attention through the bond, like a lantern lifted to check a dark corner.
"He's fine," she said.
Hana nodded. She didn't let go of the book, though.
Marika yawned. "So now we've got two secrets."
"Two secrets," Naomi agreed. "And a princess on the road."
That was when the idea showed up.
It wasn't a big idea. It was small and quiet and very reasonable. If the pitcher grew a little every day I emptied it, then what would happen if I emptied it a little more?
"No," Naomi said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You have the face."
"What face?"
"The hunger strike face," Marika said.
Hana nodded sadly. "The hunger strike face."
"That was years ago!"
"It lasted until lunch," Marika said. "We remember."
Naomi stood, picked up the nearest candle, and pointed at the door.
"Bed. Whatever that idea is: no."
I went to bed.
I kept the idea, though. Thoughts didn't travel through the bond.
I'd checked.
Life went on, the way it does when you're keeping secrets. Everything looked exactly the same from the outside. It was just louder on the inside.
Five hundred swings every morning. A sparring match with Naomi, who still used one hand. I still lost.
Healing hour every afternoon. Sixteen. Sixteen again. Then, three days later, seventeen.
Hana wrote it down. Marika pretended not to notice. Naomi said nothing at all, which was how I knew she thought about it constantly.
Now that I knew what to look for, I watched the pitcher in my chest like a hawk.
It drained during healing hour. Then it refilled for the rest of the day, slow and steady, a trickle at a time, until it was full again by the next afternoon. That part never changed.
But the count never went up in the middle of a healing hour. Not once. When it went up, it went up overnight.
Whatever was happening to me, it happened while I slept.
"So you grow in your sleep," Marika said when I told them. "Like a mushroom."
"Like a growing boy," Hana said, delighted.
"I'm seventeen."
"Growing," Hana said firmly, "boy."
A letter came for Marika from the south. Not for me, for once. For her.
"It's from Rosamund," Hana told me at breakfast, like a spy passing on secrets.
"The plow horse one?"
"The plow horse one."
Marika had the letter half-hidden under her plate. "It's about patrol routes," she said. "Very dull. Very professional."
"She drew you a map," Hana said.
"Of the patrol route."
"With a little horse on it."
"A professional horse." Her ears were bright pink. She read the letter again anyway. By my count, that was the third time.
Then, on a gray morning, at swing four hundred and twelve, something knocked on the inside of my head.
Not a thought. Not a headache, exactly. More like someone had opened a door at the back of my skull and was trying to fit three wardrobes through it at once.
My sword hit the gravel. So did my knees.
"Young Master!"
Sigrid was already moving. Naomi was faster. She crossed the training yard before my sword had finished bouncing, and her hand closed on my shoulder like a vise made of worry.
"Fabian."
"I'm fine," I said. "I think. Give me a second."
The kitchen door banged open. Hana came flying out with a ladle in one hand and her tin of salve in the other, already open.
"Elysia preserve us, what happened? Where does it hurt?"
"Nowhere. It doesn't hurt. It's just... crowded."
Then came the hoofbeats.
Marika's horse came through the gate at a speed that made two guards flatten themselves against the wall. She was out of the saddle before it had fully stopped.
"What did you do?" she demanded.
"Nothing! I was swinging!"
Naomi looked at her. "You were on the east road."
"I was nearby."
"The east road is an hour's ride."
"Not the way I ride it." Her ears went pink. "And I was turning back anyway. My horse was bored."
Naomi didn't argue. She just looked at the guards hovering at the edges of the yard.
"Sigrid. Clear the yard."
"My lady."
In ten seconds, it was just the four of us and one very confused horse.
The crowded feeling in my head was settling now. Things were finding their places, the way they had on the day of my blessing. Names first. Then what they meant.
"Skills," I said. "New ones."
Hana's ladle sagged. "New ones? Already?"
"How many?" Naomi asked.
I counted. Then I counted again, because I didn't believe it the first time.
"Three."
Marika sat down hard on the gravel next to me. "Three more?"
"Three more."
"Fabian," Naomi said, very calmly, which meant she wasn't. "Names."
I closed my eyes and read them off, one by one.
"「Mass Heal」. It's like 「Heal」, but not for one person. For everyone inside the circle."
Hana put her hand over her mouth. "Everyone," she whispered.
"「Vigor」." I searched for the right way to put it. "It takes the tiredness out of someone's body. Not wounds. Just exhaustion. Enough to keep them going. One person at a time."
Naomi went still.
She didn't say anything. She just looked past the estate wall, toward the dark line of trees on the horizon. Toward the Gloamwood.
Through the bond, her lantern flickered once.
I knew what she was thinking about. The gate. Ten years ago. Waiting for two people who never came home.
"Tides don't stop when knights get tired," she said at last. It was the quietest I'd ever heard her.
I didn't know what to say to that. So for once, I didn't say anything.
"And the third?" Marika asked.
I looked at the third one for a long time.
"「Blessing of Elysia」," I said slowly. "And there's another word next to it. Passive."
Marika frowned. "What's a passive?"
"I think it means it's always on. You don't cast it. It just... is."
"Like worrying," Hana said.
"Like your worrying," Marika said.
"Says the knight who rode an hour in half the time because her horse was bored."
Marika opened her mouth, closed it, and found something very interesting about the gravel.
"What does it do?" Naomi asked.
That was the problem.
With the other skills, the words had settled like they belonged there. This one wouldn't. Only the first line held still. Everything below it was...
Well.
「Blessing of Elysia」 (Passive)
For every good deed you do, Elysia will grant you a reward.
?????
?????
?????
"It says," I said carefully, "'For every good deed you do, Elysia will grant you a reward.'"
Silence.
"What kind of reward?" Marika asked.
"It doesn't say."
"What counts as a good deed?"
"It doesn't say."
"Does it say anything else?"
"Yes. It says question marks."
"How do you say question marks out loud?"
"You don't. That's the problem."
Hana sank down onto the gravel beside us, ladle and all. Her eyes were shining, the way they did right before she cried.
"Father used to read me stories from the Records," she said. "He always said Elysia never stopped listening. Even when she couldn't answer."
Nobody said anything to that.
I thought about the soft green-and-gold light at the shrine. The way it had felt like being held.
Maybe she couldn't answer.
But she'd just written me a note. Most of it was question marks, but still.
Naomi was the first to stand. She brushed the gravel off her knees and looked down at the three of us like a commander counting her troops.
"Nobody casts anything new," she said. "Not yet."
"Not even to see what color the circle—"
"Not yet."
I wanted to argue. I really did. But Marika was looking at me, and Hana was looking at me, and Naomi's lantern was still flickering, just a little.
"...Not yet," I agreed.
Naomi held out her hand and pulled me to my feet. Then she picked up my sword and handed it back to me, hilt first.
"Four hundred and twelve," she said. "Eighty-eight to go."
Of course.
I picked up where I'd left off. My arms felt exactly the same. My head felt like a house the morning after a party, full of things that hadn't been there the night before.
Somewhere on the road from Sanctara, a princess was riding all this way to witness a Saint with two skills.
I had six.
And one of them was mostly question marks.