Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)(55)
Author: Kristin Cashore

Sons, keep your swords drawn – there’s no point in being careless.”

“I’ll disarm her,” Bitterblue said, “if it will make you more comfortable. Please, Katsa,” she said apologetical y, holding out her hand.

Katsa reached into her boot and handed the child her knife, numbly. She sat in the chair that was brought to her and numbly registered the bustle of people forming a circle, the clanking of swords, the women wiping their faces and gasping, clinging to their husbands’ arms. She dropped her head into her hands. For her mind was returning, and she understood now what she had done.

———

It was like a spel that fizzled away slowly, popping one bubble at a time, and leaving their minds empty. Truly empty; they spoke stupidly, slowly, straining to reconstruct a conversation they couldn’t remember, even though every one of them had been present for it.

Ror couldn’t even give straight answers to Bitterblue’s questions, about when Leck had arrived in Lienid, what he’d said; what he’d done to convince them that Po’s castle was his. To convince Ror to leave his city and his court and come to a remote corner of his kingdom, with his wife and his sons, and amuse Leck and subjugate himself to Leck, while Leck waited for a daughter who might never arrive. What things Leck had said during that waiting time came slowly, incredulously from Ror’s lips. “I believe… I believe he told me that he would like to establish himself in my city.

Beside my throne!”

“I believe he said something about my serving girls, something I won’t repeat,” Ror’s queen said.

“He spoke of altering our trade agreements! I’m sure of it!” Ror exclaimed. “In favor of Monsea!”

Ror stood and began to stride around the room. Katsa rose woodenly, in respect for a rising king, but the queen pulled her back down. “If we stood every time he marched around we’d always be standing,” she said. Her hand rested on Katsa’s arm a bit longer than was necessary, and her gaze on Katsa’s face. Her voice was gentle. The further the assembly moved toward unraveling Leck’s manipulations, the more kindly the Queen of Lienid seemed to look upon the lady at her side.

Ror’s fury escalated, and the fury of his sons, each shaking off his stupor and rising one by one. Shouting their outrage, arguing with each other about what had been said. “Is Po really all right?” one of them asked Katsa, one of the younger ones who paused before her chair and looked into her face. A tear dropped onto her cheek, and she left it to Bitterblue to tell their story, to tell truths about Leck that struck the assembly like arrows.

That Leck had desired to hurt the child in some eerie, horrible way; that Leck had kidnapped Grandfather Tealiff; that Leck had murdered Ashen.

That his men had nearly murdered Po. And now Ror’s grief matched his fury, and he knelt on the floor sobbing, for his father and his son and especial y his sister; and his sons’ shouts grew even louder and more incredulous. Katsa thought dumbly that it was no wonder Po was so voluble.

In Lienid everyone was, and everyone spoke at once. She wiped the tears from her face and fought against her own confusion.

When the young brother crouched before Katsa again and offered her his handkerchief, she took it and stared stupidly into his face. “Do you think Po’s all right?” he asked. “Wil you go back for him now? I’d like to go with you.”

She wiped her face with the handkerchief. “Which one are you?”

The brother smiled. “I’m Skye. I’ve never seen anyone throw a dagger so fast. You’re exactly as I imagined you.”

He rose to his feet again and went to his father. Katsa held her stomach and tried to calm the sourness surging inside her. The fog of Leck’s Grace was slower to leave her than to leave the others, and she was sick with what she’d done.

Yes, Leck was dead, and that was a good thing. But it was because she’d used a dagger – a dagger – to stop someone talking. It was as violent as anything she’d ever done for Randa. And she hadn’t even known what she was doing.

———

She must go to Po. She must leave them all to piece the truth together by themselves. It didn’t matter, these details they picked apart and discussed and argued over, on and on, as the day turned to night. Bitterblue was saved, and that mattered; Po was alone and hurt, and struggling through a Monsean winter, and that mattered.

“Wil you tell them about the ring?” Bitterblue asked her that night as Katsa sat in their bedroom forcing her sluggish mind to take stock of their supply situation.

“No,” she said. “There’s no need. it’ll only worry them. The first thing I’ll do when I reach Po is give it back to him.”

“Wil we leave very early?”

Katsa’s eyes snapped to the child who stood before her, her face serious, one hand resting on the knife at her belt.

The Queen of Monsea, in trousers and short hair, looking for all the world like a miniature pirate.

“You needn’t come,” Katsa said. “It’l be a difficult journey. Once we reach Monport we’l be traveling very fast, and I won’t lessen my pace for your comfort.”

“Of course I’m coming.”

“You’re the Queen of Monsea now. You can commission a great ship and travel in luxury. You can wait until the season turns.”

“And fret, here in Lienid, until you send word that Po’s all right? Of course I’ll come with you.”

Katsa looked into her lap and swal owed a lump in her throat. She didn’t like to admit how it comforted her, to know Bitterblue would be with her for this. “We leave at first light,” she said, “on a boat Ror’s furnished from the vil age nearby. We go first to col ect Captain Faun and resupply her ship. Then she’l take us to Monport.”

Bitterblue nodded. “Then I’m going to take a bath and go to sleep. Where do you suppose I must go to find someone who’l bring hot water?”

Katsa smiled, mildly. “Ring the bel , Lady Queen. Po’s servants are a bit overtaxed at the moment, I do believe; but for the ruler of Monsea, someone will come.”

It was, in fact, Po’s mother who came. She appraised the situation and produced a servant girl who swept Bitterblue off to another room, murmuring reassurances about the temperature of the water and curtsying as best she could with her arms ful of towels.

Po’s mother stayed behind and sat beside Katsa on the bed. She clasped her hands in her lap. The rings on her fingers caught the light from the fireplace and drew Katsa’s eyes.

“Po told me you wear nineteen rings,” she heard herself saying, senselessly. She took a breath. She gripped her forehead and tried, for the hundredth time, to drive from her mind the image of Leck nailed to his chair by her dagger.

The queen opened her hands and considered her rings. She closed them again, and looked sideways at Katsa. “The others think you remembered the truth, suddenly, about Leck,” she said. “They think you remembered it suddenly and silenced him right away, before his lies caused you to forget again. And perhaps that is what happened. But I believe I understand why you found the strength to act at that moment.”

Katsa looked back at the woman, at her calm face and quiet, intel igent eyes. She answered the question she saw in those eyes. “Po has told me the truth of his Grace.”

“He must love you very much,” the queen said, so simply that Katsa started. Katsa ducked her head.

“I was very angry,” she said, “when first he told me. But I have… recovered from my anger.”

It was a woeful y inadequate description of her feelings, this Katsa knew. But the queen watched her, and Katsa thought the woman understood some of what she didn’t say.

“Wil you marry him?” the queen asked, so plainly that Katsa started again; but this she could answer as plainly.

She looked into the queen’s eyes.

“I won’t ever marry,” she said.

The queen’s forehead creased in puzzlement, but she didn’t say anything. She hesitated, and then spoke. “You saved my son’s life in Monsea,”

she said, “and you saved it again today. I’ll never forget it.”

She stood, bent forward, and kissed Katsa’s forehead, and for the third time since this woman’s arrival, Katsa started with surprise. The queen turned and left the room, her skirts sweeping through the doorway. As the door closed behind her, and Katsa stared at the blankness where Po’s mother had been, the image of Leck rose again into her mind.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

Katsa kept to a far corner of the deck as Bear and Red and a number of other men hauled the ropes that swung Leck’s coffin on board. She wished to have nothing to do with it, wished even that the ropes would snap and pitch Leck’s body into the sea, to be torn apart by sea creatures.

She climbed up the mast and sat alone in the riggings.

It was a grand procession of royalty that charted a course now to Monsea. For not only was Bitterblue a queen, but Prince Skye and King Ror attended her. His sister’s child, Ror had pointed out, was a child. And even if she weren’t, she returned to an impossible situation. A kingdom deeply under a spel ; a kingdom that believed its king to be virtuous and its princess to be il , weak, possibly even mad. The child queen could not be sent off trippingly to Monsea to announce that she was now in charge, and denounce the dead king an entire kingdom adored. Bitterblue would need authority, and she would need guidance. Both of these Ror could provide.

Ror would send Skye to Po. Silvern, Ror had sent on a different ship to the Middluns, to col ect Grandfather Tealiff and bring him home. His remaining sons Ror had sent home to their families and their duties, turning a deaf ear to each son’s insistence that his proper place was in Ror City, managing Ror’s affairs. Ror left his affairs instead to his queen, as he always did when circumstances took him away from his throne. The queen was more than capable.

Katsa watched Ror, day after day, from her place in the riggings. She became familiar with the sound of his laughter, and his good-natured conversation that set the sailors at ease. There was nothing humble or compromising about Ror. He was handsome, like Po, and confident, like Po, and so much more authoritative in his bearing than Po could ever be. But – and this Katsa came gradual y to understand – he was not drunk on his power. He might never dream of helping a sailor to haul a rope, but he would stand with the sailor interestedly while the sailor hauled the rope, and ask him questions about the rope, about his work, his home, his mother and father, his cousin who spent a year once fishing in the lakes of Nander.

It struck Katsa that here was a thing she’d never encountered: a king who looked at his people, instead of over their heads, a king who saw outside himself.