The sandal sat on our doorstep for twelve days.
I tried to bring it inside on the first evening. Noctavia stopped me at the door with one raised finger.
"Leave it."
"It's a sandal."
"It's evidence," she said, in the voice she used to use for war councils. "If its owner comes back, we return it. Until then, nobody touches it."
So nobody touched it.
By the sixth day, one of the hens, which Noctavia insisted she had never named, had decided the sandal was a nest.
By the ninth day, there was an egg in it.
By the eleventh, Noctavia was walking past the front door every hour to check on it, and pretending she was looking for her slippers.
On the twelfth day, a little before noon, a young man came limping up our road.
He was wearing one white sandal and one muddy brown boot. Every few steps he stopped, looked back toward the village, looked forward at our cabin, and looked back again, like a man walking to his own trial.
I knew that white robe, and I knew that face.
"Hello!" I called, and waved. "I have your sandal!"
Though I don't know why it was here in the first place.
He stopped so suddenly that he nearly fell over.
"H-Hero Ashford," he said. "Yes. Thank you. I'm so sorry to bother you, I only came for my..."
"It has an egg in it."
He stared at it so intensely that I thought the egg was about to crack.
"...I see."
"Would you like some tea?"
"No! No, thank you, I really shouldn't..."
The door opened behind me.
Noctavia stood there with her arms crossed and her tail swaying slowly. She looked at the young man for a long, quiet moment.
"Sit," she said.
He sat down right there, in the dirt of our road.
"Not there. At the table." She turned and went back inside. "I'm making tea. Don't argue."
He looked at me with the eyes of a man who had just been invited to his own execution.
"She makes very good tea," I said.
"That," he said faintly, "is not what I'm worried about."
His name was Tomas.
He told us this in a voice so small that Noctavia made him say it twice. He was an acolyte at the cathedral, nineteen years old, and he sat on the very edge of our kitchen chair with his back straight and both hands wrapped around his cup, as if it were the only thing keeping him in the world.
"Drink it," said Noctavia.
"Yes, my lady."
"Don't call me that."
"Yes, Demon Lord."
"...Don't call me that either."
"What should I call you?"
She thought about it.
"Noctavia is fine," she said, as if each syllable cost her a coin.
Tomas looked into his tea. Then, very slowly, he drank some.
His shoulders came down about an inch.
"It's good," he whispered, amazed.
"I know," said Noctavia, but her tail gave a small, pleased flick under the table.
Then Tomas looked at me, and something in his face changed.
It was the way the children in Millbrook had looked at the baker's very large dog.
"Hero Ashford," he said, "I have to tell you, I've read everything about you. Everything. I know the Siege of Greywater by heart. You held the bridge for nine days."
"Six," I said.
"Nine! It's in the hymn!"
"The other three days, I was just standing there. Nobody had told me I could stop."
"Nine days?" said Noctavia.
She had put down the teapot.
"Six."
"He says nine."
"The Church likes round numbers."
"They sing about you in the cathedral," Tomas went on, now unstoppable. "The little ones play at being you in the courtyard. They fight over who gets to be the Hero. Last spring there was a real fight, with a black eye, and Sister Margaret had to..."
"Wait," said Noctavia. "Go back. What happened at the bridge?"
"Noctavia..."
"I'm asking him."
So Tomas told her.
He told her about the bridge, and the river, and the wounded squad I'd carried across the water, one man on each shoulder and a third dragging behind me.
He told her about the night in the mountain pass when I'd gone back for a lost banner and come back with it, plus four enemy soldiers who had decided they'd rather follow me.
He told her about the time I'd held a fortress door shut with my back for an entire night, while the soldiers behind it dug their way out.
Noctavia listened to every story with narrowed eyes, the way she used to look at enemy maps.
"You never told me any of this," she said to me at last.
"You never asked."
"...I'm asking now."
I looked down at the table.
"It's not very interesting."
"It's interesting to me," she said, very quietly.
Then she looked away, because she had said it out loud.
Tomas, who was apparently braver than he looked, kept going.
He told us the Hero had grown up in the cathedral. She had slept in the east dormitory, he said, and Sister Margaret had taught her to read, and the whole Church thought of her as...
He stopped.
"As their own."
"I was seven when they took me in," I said, since it seemed silly not to. "My parents died in the first winter of the war. I don't remember them well. The Church was..."
I turned my cup in my hands.
"It was all I had. It was my family, I suppose."
Nobody said anything.
Noctavia reached across the table, took my cup, and refilled it.
Then she refilled Tomas's cup, and her own, without a word, and set the teapot down very gently, as if it were something that could break.
"Sister Margaret is very worried about you," Tomas said suddenly.
He seemed to have been working up to it.
"She says you haven't written in a while now. She would like to visit, if that is all right. She... I should say, she is afraid of..."
He trailed off, looking at Noctavia with great regret.
"Her brother fell at Greywater. In the war. She doesn't like demons. But she asked me to ask. She says she wants to see you with her own eyes."
"Of course she can come," I said at once.
I looked at Noctavia.
Her jaw was tight, and her tail had stopped moving.
"She may come," she said. "If she wipes her feet."
Tomas left a little while later, with his sandal back on his foot and the egg removed, which Noctavia had taken and refused to discuss.
At the door he hesitated, turned around, and bowed three times in a row.
"One more thing," he said. "The Council asked me to remember everything about the cabin. They said it's so they can pray for you properly."
He swallowed.
"Is it all right if I remember the chickens?"
"Of course," I said. "Remember the chickens!"
"Thank you. And thank you for the tea."
He bowed again, then ran down the road at top speed, half sandal, half boot.
I waved until he was out of sight.
When I turned around, Noctavia was standing in the doorway with her arms crossed and a tiny crease between her eyebrows.
"Something wrong?" I asked.
"No," she said. "He was nice."
"He was."
"...Nice people shouldn't ask to remember chickens."
I laughed.
She didn't.
That evening, she sat at the kitchen table with a scrap of paper and a pen that she held like a dagger.
She wrote something, crossed it out, and wrote it again.
When she finished, she snapped her fingers, and a small bird made of shadow rose off the table, took the paper in its beak, and flew out the window.
I had read it over her shoulder.
It said:
Yes. I am certain. Do not ask again.
And underneath, in smaller letters:
Eat something.
"You told your generals to eat?"
"They're thin."
"Aren't they demons?"
"They're thin demons."
I didn't ask about Sister Margaret.
I didn't have to.
She may come, if she wipes her feet.
That means, I'll try, for you.
I added it to the dictionary and underlined the word "try" twice.
Outside, the hen settled down on the doorstep and looked deeply offended.
I suspected she was waiting for the sandal to come back.