Graceling (Graceling Realm #1)(58)
Author: Kristin Cashore

During the night, the sound of breathing all around her, Katsa tried to work it out. She sat against the wall and watched Po lying in a blanket on the floor beside his brother and the Monsean guards. He slept, and his face was peaceful. His beautiful face.

When he’d come back to the cabin after their conversation, with his bow in one hand and an armload of rabbits in the other, he’d unloaded his quarry contentedly on his brother and shrugged himself out of his coat. Then he’d come to her, where she sat brooding against the wall. He’d crouched before her, taken her hands in his and kissed them, and rubbed his cold face against them. “I’m sorry,” he’d said; and she’d felt suddenly that everything was normal, and Po was himself, and they’d start again, fresh and new. Then over dinner, as the others bantered and Bitterblue teased her guards, Katsa watched Po withdraw. He ate little. He sank into silence, unhappiness in the lines of his face. And her heart ached so much to look at him that she walked out of the cabin and stumped around for ages alone in the dark.

At moments he seemed happy. But something was clearly wrong. If he would just… if he would only just look at her. If he would only look into her face.

And of course, if alone was what he needed, alone was what she would give. But – and she thought this might be unfair, but stillshe decided it – she was going to require proof. He was going to have to convince her, convince her utterly, that solitude was his need. Only then would she leave him to his strange anguish.

———

In the morning Po seemed cheerful enough; but Katsa, who was beginning to feel like a henpecking mother, registered his lack of interest in the food, even the Lienid food, spread across the table. He ate practical y nothing, and then made some vague, unlikely remark about checking on the lame horse. He wandered outside.

“What’s wrong with him?” Bitterblue asked.

Katsa’s eyes slid to the child’s face, and held her steady gray gaze. There was no point pretending she didn’t know what Bitterblue meant.

Bitterblue had never been stupid.

“I don’t know,” Katsa said. “He won’t tell me.”

“Sometimes he seems himself,” Skye said, “and other times he sinks into a mood.” He cleared his throat. “But I thought it might be a lovers’ quarrel.”

Katsa looked at him level y. She ate a piece of bread. “It’s possible, but I don’t think so.”

Skye raised an eyebrow and grinned. “Seems to me you’d know if it were.”

“If only things were that simple,” Katsa said, drily. “There’s something strange about his eyes,” Bitterblue said.

“Yes,” Katsa said, “wel , it’s likely he has the strangest eyes in all seven kingdoms. But I’d have expected you to notice that before now.”

“No,” Bitterblue said. “I mean there’s something di fferent about his eyes.”

Something different about his eyes.

Yes, there was a difference. The difference was that he wouldn’t look at her, or at any of them. Almost as if it pained his heart to raise his eyes and focus on another person. Almost as if – An image flashed into her mind then, out of nowhere. Po fal ing through the light, a horse’s enormous body fal ing above him. Po, slamming into the water face-first, the horse crashing in after him.

And more images. Po, sick and gray before the fire, the skin of his face bruised black. Po squinting at her and rubbing his eyes.

Katsa choked on her bread. She shot to her feet and knocked over her chair.

Skye thumped her back. “Great seas, Katsa. Are you all right?”

Katsa coughed, and gasped something about checking on the lame horse. She ran out of the cabin.

———

Po wasn’t with the horses, but when Katsa asked after him, one of the guards pointed in the direction of the pool.

Katsa ran behind the cabin and over the hil .

He was standing, his back to her, staring into the frozen pond. His shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets.

“I know you’re invincible, Katsa,” he said without turning around. “But even you should put on a coat when you come outside.”

“Po,” she said. “Turn around and look at me.”

He dropped his head. His shoulders rose and fel with one deep breath. He didn’t turn around.

“Po,” she said. “Look at me.”

He turned then, slowly. He looked into her face. His eyes seemed to focus on hers, for just an instant; and then his eyes dropped. They emptied. She saw it happen; she saw his eyes empty.

She whispered. “Po. Are you blind?”

At that, something in him seemed to break. He fel to his knees. A tear made an icy track down his face. When Katsa went to him and dropped down before him, he let her come; the fight had gone out of him and he let her in. Katsa’s arms came around him. He pulled Katsa against him, practical y smothered her with his grip, and cried into her neck.

She held him, simply held him, and touched him, and kissed his cold face.

“Oh, Katsa,” he cried. “Katsa.”

They knelt like that for a very long time.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

That morning a squal kicked up. By afternoon the squal had turned into a gentle but soggy storm. “I can’t bear the thought of more winter- weather travel,” Bitterblue said, half asleep before the fire. “Now that we’re here with Po, can’t we stay here, Katsa, until it stops snowing?”

But on the heels of that storm came another, and after that storm another, as if winter had torn up the schedule and decided it wasn’t going to end after all. Bitterblue sent two guards with a letter for Ror. Ror wrote back from Bitterblue’s court that the weather was just as well ; the more time Bitterblue gave him to sort out the stories Leck had left behind, the smoother and the safer her transition to the throne would be. He would plan the coronation for true spring, and she could wait out the storms for as long as she wished.

Katsa knew the cabin’s close quarters were trying to Po, burdened as he was with his unhappy secret. But if everyone was staying, then at least he didn’t have to justify quite yet his own intention not to leave. He kept his discomfort to himself and helped the guards lead the horses to a nearby rock shelter he claimed to have found during his recovery.

His story came out slowly, whenever he and Katsa were able to contrive ways to be alone.

The day of Katsa and Bitterblue’s departure had not been easy for Po. He’d stillhad his sight, but it hadn’t felt quite right to him; it had changed in some way his head was too muddled to quantify, some way that gave him a deep sense of misgiving.

“You didn’t tell me,” Katsa said. “You let me leave you like that.”

“If I’d told you, you never would have gone. You had to go.”

Po had stumbled his way to the cabin’s bed. He’d spent most of that day lying on his unhurt side with his eyes closed, waiting for Leck’s soldiers and for his dizziness to pass. He’d tried to convince himself that when his head cleared, his sight would, too. But waking the next morning, he’d opened his eyes to blackness.

“I was angry,” he told her. “And unsteady on my feet. And I was out of food, which meant that I had to find my way to the fish trap. I couldn’t be bothered. I didn’t eat, that day or the next.”

What had driven him finally to the pool was not his hunger. It was Leck’s soldiers. He’d sensed them climbing the rocks toward the cabin. “I was up and stumbling,” he told her, “before I even realized what I was doing. I was barreling around the cabin col ecting my things; and then I was outside, finding a crack in a rock to hide them. I wasn’t at my most lucid. I’m sure I must have fal en down, over and over. But I knew where the pool was, and I got myself to it. The water was awful, so cold, but it woke me, and it was less dizzying, somehow, to be swimming, rather than walking. I made it to the cave somehow, and somehow I pulled myself onto the rocks. And then, in the cave, with the soldiers shouting outside and my body so cold I thought I would bite off my own tongue with my chattering teeth – I found it, Katsa.”

He stopped talking, and he was quiet for so long that she wondered if he’d forgotten what he’d been saying.

“What did you find?”

He turned his head to her, surprised. “Clarity,” he said. “My thoughts cleared. There was no light in the cave; there was nothing to see. And yet I sensed the cave with my Grace, so vividly. And I realized what I was doing. Sitting in the cabin, feeling sorry for myself, when Leck was out there somewhere and people were in danger. In the cave it struck me how despicable that was.”

The thought of Leck had brought Po back into the water, out of the cave and to the fish trap. Back to the cabin to fumble, numb from cold, with the lighting of the fire. The next few days were grim. “I was weak and dizzy and sick. I walked, at first, never farther than the fish trap. Then with Leck in my mind I pushed a bit farther. My balance was passable, if I was sitting still. I made the bow. With Leck in my mind, I began to practice shooting it.”

His head dropped. Silence settled over him. And Katsa thought she understood the rest. Po had held the notion of Leck close to himself; Leck had given him a reason to reach for his strength. He’d driven himself toward health and balance. And then they’d returned to him with the happy news that Leck was dead. Po was left without a reason.

Unhappiness had choked him once again.

The very fact of his unhappiness made him unhappy.

“I’ve no right to feel sorry for myself,” he said to her one day, when they’d gone out into a quiet snowfal to fetch water. “I see everything. I see things I shouldn’t see. I’m wall owing in self-pity, when I’ve lost nothing.”

Katsa crouched with him before the pool. “That’s the first truly idiotic thing you’ve ever said to me.”

His mouth tightened. He picked up one of the rocks they used to bash through the ice. He lifted the rock above his head and drove it, hard, into the frozen surface of the pool; and finally she was rewarded with a low rumble of something that almost passed for a laugh. “Your brand of comfort bears some similarity to your tactical offense.”

“You’ve lost something,” she said, “and you’ve every right to feel sorrow for what you’ve lost. They’re not the same, sight and your Grace. Your Grace shows you the form of things, but it doesn’t show you beauty. You’ve lost beauty.”

His mouth tightened again, and he looked away from her. When he looked back she thought he might be about to cry But he spoke tearlessly, stonily. “I won’t go back to Lienid. I won’t go to my castle, if I’m not able to see it. It’s hard enough to be with you. It’s why I didn’t tell you the truth. I wanted you to go away, because it hurts to be with you when I can’t see you.”