The Queen of Bellonia waited until I had my mouth full.
I'm certain of that now. At the time I thought it was an accident. We were having breakfast on the long gallery above the gate court, in the sun, because she'd said that after the winter she'd had she was never eating indoors again if she could help it. She sat in a chair with a rug over her knees that Felix kept putting back. Her light was white, and a little stronger than yesterday. The rest of us sat round a table that had been carried out for the purpose: Felix, Cordelia, Marika, Liesel, me. Wren stood behind my chair, because Wren always stands behind my chair.
I'd just taken a large bite of bread with something on it that tasted like honey and burned like a hearth, when the Queen said, quite pleasantly:
"Saint. Have you thought about staying?"
I stopped chewing.
"In Fulmara," she went on, as if I'd asked. "You'd have a house. The one by the river gate is empty; it has a garden. You'd have work, as much as you wanted, and I'd see that nobody ever asked you for more. And you'd have—" She considered. "Company."
I tried to swallow. It didn't go well.
"Bellonia has a great many women," said the Queen, "and very few men worth a cup of tea. You'd find, I think, that you could have your pick of them." A small pause. "Several picks. As many as you liked, really. I'd sign whatever needed signing."
Felix put both hands over his face. "Mother."
Marika inhaled a crumb and began to cough so violently that Cordelia, without looking round, thumped her once between the shoulders, hard enough to rattle the cups.
I opened my mouth. I don't know what I was going to say. I never found out.
"No," said Liesel.
She hadn't raised her voice. She was looking straight at the Queen of Bellonia across the breakfast table, the way she'd looked at a bear with her spear.
"He isn't staying," said Liesel. "And he isn't picking." She lifted her left hand off the table, so that the sun caught the pale ring on it, the one I'd made from ash. "He's mine. Only mine."
There was a short silence on the gallery.
Behind my chair, Wren hummed three notes, low and approving, like somebody who'd been waiting a long time for a particular door to be shut.
The Queen looked at Liesel. At the ring. At me, sitting there with honey-and-fire bread halfway down my throat and no idea what my face was doing.
And then Queen Aurelia of Bellonia laughed.
It wasn't a big laugh. She didn't have a big laugh in her yet. But it was a real one, all the way down, and it went on for longer than she'd meant it to, and at the end of it she had to put a hand against her side and lean back in her chair, and Felix, through his fingers, was staring at her as if she'd done something miraculous, which I suppose she had.
"Oh, I know," said the Queen, when she could. "My son told me. Last night. At some length." She wiped her eyes. "I wanted to see your face, Princess. Octavian princesses are supposed to be very dignified. Your sister told me so herself."
Cordelia, without expression, drank her tea.
"We're not dignified," said Liesel. "We're just quiet until it's worth it." She went back to her breakfast. "It was worth it."
The Queen laughed again, more carefully this time, and turned to me.
"You may go and eat my city, Saint," she said. "All of it. My son has a list." She settled the rug back over her knees herself, before Felix could. "Come back in one piece. And come back his."
She tipped her head at Liesel.
"Hers," I said, through the last of the bread. It was the only word I could manage. It seemed to be the right one.
Corvus was waiting for us at the gate.
Alone.
He was standing just inside it, in the shade of the arch, in a plain coat, with his hands at his sides. No ring of spears round him. No captain with a scarred eyebrow. Just a thin, dark-haired young man in a gateway, with the whole bright morning of Fulmara on the other side of it, and the oddest expression on his face.
He looked behind him as we came down the steps. At the empty court. Then at the empty arch. Then, slowly, all round himself, in a full circle, the way you'd look round a room you've lived in all your life after somebody's taken out the walls.
Nobody there.
And Corvus smiled.
There it was. All teeth. Felix had told me about it on the gatehouse roof at Greymark, and I'd thought I'd never see it, and I'd been wrong. It was every bit as bad as he'd promised. It was the worst smile I've ever seen on a human face, wide and sudden and lopsided, like a dog that's been told it can come on the furniture. It took over his whole face and stayed there.
"THAT," said Felix, pointing at it, delighted. "That's the one. Fabian. That's the one."
Corvus didn't stop smiling. I don't think he could.
Felix had a list. Felix had, it turned out, been carrying the list in his head since the day he left, and adding to it, and he had very firm opinions about the order.
The honey-pepper bread came first, because it's best before the sun gets high: a round, flat, golden loaf from a baker's window at the top of the long stair, split hot and spread with honey that had black pepper ground straight into it. I'd had a bite at breakfast. This was different. This was the whole loaf, still steaming, and the pepper came up the back of my nose a breath after the sweetness, so that the first mouthful was summer and the second was a fire in a hearth.
"See?" said Felix, with his mouth full. "See?"
Marika ate two. Then she went back for a third. The baker refused her money, refused Cordelia's, and finally refused Felix's in a voice that suggested Felix had been refused in that shop before and would be again.
That was how it went all day. I'd stopped noticing it by noon. Every stall we came to, somebody had heard the songs, or stood in the hall two days ago, or had a cousin in the village by the forest, and the money went back across the counter as fast as Cordelia could put it down. Cordelia, who had come along "for the Crown," and who carried a purse of Octavian silver for the purpose of paying for everything, ended the day with every coin she started with, and looked faintly put out about it.
I didn't have any money. I never do. Naomi says I'd give it away before I got to the end of the street, and she's right.
The pie woman by the bridge was second. She had a stall under the first arch of the old bridge, a great iron oven on wheels and a counter worn smooth, and she sold pies the size of my two fists together, with a lid of pastry so short it fell apart if you looked at it hard. Inside: river mutton, plums, something green, and enough black pepper to make Marika's eyes water, which Marika claimed was the onions.
The pie woman looked at Corvus, standing at her counter with no keepers, eating a pie with both hands. She looked at him for a long time. Then she put a second pie in front of him without a word, and went back to her oven, and I saw her wipe her eyes on her sleeve when she thought nobody was watching.
Everybody in the market was looking at Corvus. Not unkindly. Just the way you'd look at a bird you'd only ever seen in a cage, walking about in the street. Women stopped what they were doing. A little girl walked right up to him at the fishwives' end of the bridge, looked up at him with enormous solemn eyes, and handed him a flower out of her own hair. He took it. He didn't know what to do with it. He held it in both hands for the rest of the morning like it might go off.
The eels were third.
I'm not going to talk about the eels. Felix made me eat one: smoked, glistening, laid on black bread with butter and some kind of sharp pickled root. I said I hated it. Then I ate the rest of his. Then I asked the eel-wife her name, and she told me, and I wrote it down in Hana's notebook, and she watched me do it and asked Felix in Bellonian what on earth the Saint was doing, and he told her, and she gave me another eel for nothing.
The things on sticks were last.
They lived at the bottom of the dyers' steps, down by the river, where the water runs blue and red and yellow out of the dye-works in long ribbons. An old woman sat on an upturned crate there with a brazier, turning little brown somethings on wooden skewers over the coals. They were crisp. They were salty. They were extremely good. Nobody, Felix swore, had ever known what they were.
Marika ate six. Liesel ate three. I ate four, and was reaching for a fifth, when I thought to ask.
"What are they?"
Felix shrugged, enormously. "It's a mystery. It's been a mystery for two hundred years. It's part of the—"
"Snails," said Corvus.
One word. Nineteen.
Marika stopped chewing.
There was a long, long moment by the dyers' steps.
Then Marika, very deliberately, finished chewing, swallowed, and reached for her seventh.
"WORTH IT," she said.
In the afternoon, Felix and Corvus took us back up through the town to the east court of the palace.
It's an old court, on the far side from the guest wing, with a well and a stone bench and three linden trees, and in the middle of it a fountain: a round stone basin, and in the middle of the basin a stone eagle with its wings half open, spouting water out of its beak. The eagle's head was a slightly different color from the rest of it. Newer. The join ran round its neck in a thin pale line.
Felix stopped in front of it. Corvus stopped beside him. Neither of them said anything for a moment.
On the rim of the basin, washing one paw in the sun, sat a gray cat.
Felix looked at the cat. Corvus looked at the cat. The cat looked at them both, with the profound indifference of a cat that has been sitting on that rim, or one very like it, since long before either of them was born.
"The cat," said Corvus.
Two words. Twenty-one.
Felix made a sound. Then another. Then he sat down on the edge of the basin, right next to the cat, and laughed until he was bent double and his spark was snapping off his fingertips into the water in little white hisses, and Corvus stood there over him with the girl's flower still in his hands and the worst smile in Bellonia all over his face, and the cat finished washing its paw, and got up, and walked away along the rim with its tail in the air.
I saw it on the way back down, in the metalworkers' lane, where the smiths' girls sit out on their steps in the afternoon with little trays of things for sale.
Liesel's hairpin had been coming loose all day. It always does. Her hair is golden and short and has never once in her life done what it was told, and she holds it back with a gold pin that has been losing the argument since the first day I saw her without a helmet. I caught it once, on the inner wall at Sanctara, when the wind took it right out of her hair and over the parapet, and my heart did something I blamed on the stairs for a very long time afterward.
This afternoon, by the dyers' steps, it had come out entirely, and she'd pushed it back in without looking, crooked, the way she always does.
And on a tray on the steps of the third smithy along, among the buckles and the little bronze bells, there was a hairpin.
It wasn't gold. It was bronze, worked thin and bright, and it was a sprig of hedge-ivy. Three small leaves on a curling stem, each leaf veined so finely you could have counted the veins. The ivy that grows on every wall in Bellonia. The one that had been on every wall since the eagle post.
I stopped in front of it.
The girl on the step looked up. She was about twelve, with soot on her nose and her mother's apron tied twice round her middle, and when she saw who'd stopped, she went very still.
"How much is that one?" I said. I pointed. Felix, a few steps further on, had his back to us, arguing with Corvus about something; I didn't want Felix. I wanted to do this one thing myself. "The ivy."
She looked at the pin. Then at me.
Then she picked it up off her tray, and stood, and took my hand, and put the pin in it, and closed my fingers round it with both of hers. Exactly the way Hana does.
She said something in Bellonian.
"I haven't got any money," I said. "I'm sorry. I never do. But my friend's got a purse, and she'll—"
The girl shook her head. Very firmly. She put her hands behind her back, so that nobody could put anything into them, and said the same thing again, slowly and loudly, the way you'd say it to somebody very foreign.
I didn't understand a word of it. I didn't need to.
"Thank you," I said.
She went scarlet and sat back down on her step and stared very hard at her bells.
Liesel was a few paces up the lane, waiting for me, with Wren beside her. She'd watched the whole thing. She had her arms folded and an expression on her face that I've learned, over a long time, means she's going to laugh at me later and is saving it.
I walked up to her with my hand closed.
"I bought you something," I said.
Liesel looked at my closed hand. Then at me.
"With what?"
"Nothing." I couldn't help it. I was so pleased with myself I could feel it all the way down to my boots. "I bought it for free."
She stared at me. Behind her, Wren looked up at the sky, which with Wren is very nearly laughing out loud.
"That isn't buying," said Liesel. "That's being given."
"I asked the price. She told me. The price was nothing. I paid it." I opened my hand. "I've never bought anything in my life. This is the first thing. I'd like you to have it."
She looked down at the bronze ivy on my palm.
She didn't say anything. She just looked at it for a long moment, and then she reached up and pulled her old gold pin out of her hair, crooked as always, and her hair fell forward over her face, and she held still.
She was waiting for me.
So I did it. I've put my hand on a great many people. Wounds, and wrists, and the backs of necks, and the inside of the Queen of Bellonia's wrist with ice round my fingers. I've never once done anything as difficult as gathering up a handful of Liesel's hair, in the middle of the metalworkers' lane, with half of Fulmara watching from its doorsteps, and pinning it back with a sprig of ivy so that it would actually stay.
It took me three tries. She didn't help.
When it was done, she put her hand up and touched it, the little bronze leaves, very lightly. Then she looked at me, and went red. Not pink. Red, from the collar all the way up, in the afternoon sun, in front of everybody.
"It'll stay," I said. "I think. It's a better shape than the old one."
"You bought it," said Liesel, "for free."
"I did."
"With nothing."
"With nothing."
"From a girl of twelve."
"She drove a very hard bargain."
And then Liesel laughed, out loud, in the street, the way she almost never does, with her hand still on the ivy in her hair. Up the lane, Felix and Corvus both turned round to see what had happened, and Marika, who'd been ahead with Cordelia, shouted back down the whole length of the metalworkers' lane:
"HE'S NEVER BOUGHT ANYTHING IN HIS LIFE."
"I just did," I said.
Liesel took the old gold pin, the one I'd caught on the inner wall all that time ago, and put it carefully in the pocket over her heart. She didn't say anything about that. She didn't need to.
We came back up to the palace as the sun went down behind it, and the whole town dropped into shadow at once, the way Felix had said it would, like a shutter coming down.
The keepers were waiting at the west gate.
All six of them, in the court, in their ring, with the captain at the front. They'd had their day to themselves. I don't know what they'd done with it. They looked as if they'd stood in that court for most of it.
Corvus stopped in the archway, where he'd stood that morning.
He looked out at the ring waiting for him in the court. Then back, past us, down the long stair into the shadowed town, where he'd walked all day with nobody's spear at his back. He was still holding the little girl's flower. It had gone limp hours ago. He hadn't put it down once.
Then he turned to Felix.
They looked at each other for a while. They didn't need to say anything; they'd been friends since the year they were blessed, and I think most of what they had to say to each other they'd said a long time ago, somewhere nobody was watching.
But Corvus said something anyway.
"Thank you," he said.
Two words. Twenty-three.
I wrote them down that night, on the last page of Hana's notebook, under a heading I'd started the day before: Corvus. Twenty-three words, in order, with the place each one was said. It's the shortest list in the notebook. I think it might be my favorite.
Then Corvus walked out across the court, alone, the last few paces he'd walk alone for a long time, and stepped into the ring. The keepers closed round him. The captain with the scarred eyebrow looked at the limp flower in his hands and didn't say anything about it.
Felix stood in the archway and watched them take him in, and didn't sing, and didn't spark, and didn't say anything at all. He just lifted his hand, at the end, the left one, open, palm out.
Inside the ring, over the keepers' shoulders, Corvus lifted his.
After supper, I went up to the long gallery with Liesel, where the Queen had had her breakfast, and we sat on the stone with our backs to the parapet and the ivy pin catching the last of the light in her hair.
Then Naomi, in my chest: (Supper?)
Half a drop. I'd stopped noticing the half. I noticed the drop.
(Eels,) I said.
A pause.
(...Noted.)
I told her. All of it, more or less, in as few words as I could make it, because cheap isn't free. The Queen. The house by the river gate. Liesel. The bread and the pies and the snails, and Marika's seventh snail, and Corvus, and the cat. Hana broke in once, to ask whether I'd eaten anything green, and I said the pie had something green in it, and she said (That doesn't count), and Marika said (IT COUNTS), and I wondered, not for the first time, how my sisters had managed to have this exact argument across six days of forest.
Liesel didn't say anything on the bond. She just sat beside me with her shoulder against mine, and once, when I said the word hairpin, I felt her candle jump.
(When?) said Naomi, at the end.
(Tomorrow. Cordelia's signed whatever needed signing. The Queen's sending riders with us as far as the eagle post.)
A longer pause.
(Good,) said Naomi. (The gate's done.)
I sat up.
(Done?)
(Hung this morning. Five beams, iron on both sides, hinges Ambrose says will outlast the wall.) A pause, and then, in Naomi's voice, something I'd almost have called pleased. (Hildegard sat on her barrel in front of it all afternoon. She says nobody's to try it until you're home to watch.)
I laughed out loud, there on the gallery, and Liesel looked at me, and I didn't explain.
(And Fabian.)
(Big Sis?)
(Hana's kept your place at the table.) A last half a drop. (Come home.)