Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)(73)
Author: Kristin Cashore

WHEN HER SLUMP-SHOULDERED former adviser was shuffled into her rooms by the Monsean Guard, Bitterblue said, "Rood. Are you thinking of kill ing yourself?"

"You've always been direct, Lady Queen," he said sadly.

"It's one of the things I like about you. I do consider such things now and then. But the knowledge of the hurt it would do to my grandchildren has always stopped me. It would confuse them."

"I see," said Bitterblue, thinking that through. "What about house arrest?"

"Lady Queen," he said, looking into her face, then beginning to blink back tears. "Would you really all ow that?"

"From now on, you're under house arrest," Bitterblue said.

"Don't leave your family's quarters, Rood. If you need anything, send word, and I'll come."

THERE WAS ANOTHER person in Bitterblue's prisons this morning that she wanted to see, for Holt had done wel . Not only were Fox and Spook behind bars, but a number of items had been returned to Bitterblue that she hadn't even realized were missing. Jewelry she'd kept in her mother's chest. The picture book she'd put on her sitting room shelves so long ago—Leck's Book of True Things with drawings of knives and sculptures and a Graceling's corpse, that made a sick sort of sense to her now. A great number of fine swords and daggers that had apparently gone missing, in recent months, from the smithy. Poor Ornik. He'd probably had his heart broken over what Fox had turned out to be.

Of course, she would not see Fox in her rooms; Fox would never again be invited to Bitterblue's rooms. Fox was brought to her office, instead, flanked by two members of the Monsean Guard.

She didn't look any the worse for wear, her hair, her face still startlingly pretty, her uneven gray eyes as striking as ever. But she snarled at Bitterblue, and said, "You can't link me or my grandmother to the crown, you know. You have no evidence of that. We won't hang."

She spoke it like a taunt, and Bitterblue watched her quietly, struck by the strangeness of seeing someone so changed. Was this, for the first time, Fox as she really was? "Do you think I want you to hang?" she asked. "For being a common thief, and not a very impressive one? Don't forget that we handed you your prize."

"My family has been thieves longer than yours has ruled,"

Fox spat out. "There's nothing common about us."

"You're thinking of my father's side of the family," said Bitterblue calmly, "and forgetting my mother's. Which reminds me. Guards, see if she has a ring on her person, would you?"

Less than a minute later, after a short, ugly struggle, Fox gave up the ring she wore on a band around her wrist, under her sleeve. One of the guards, rubbing a sore shin where he'd been kicked, passed it to Bitterblue. It was the replica of the ring Ashen had worn for Bitterblue, the ring all of Bitterblue's spies carried: gold, with inset gray stones.

Holding it in her hand, closing it in her fist, Bitterblue felt that some sort of order had now been restored, for Fox had no right to wear something of Ashen's against her skin.

"You may take her away," Bitterblue said to the guards.

"That's all I wanted."

CLERKS WHO'D HARDLY ever been up to her office before climbed the stairs today, to bring her reports.

Whenever they left her again, she sat with her head in her hands, trying to loosen her braids. The sense of being overwhelmed slammed against her. Where was she to start? The Monsean Guard was a great worry, for it was huge and it was everywhere; it was a net that spread itself across the entire kingdom, and she depended upon it to protect her people.

"Froggatt," she said to her clerk the next time he walked through the door. "How will I teach everyone to think things through, and make their own decisions, and become real people again?"

Froggatt stared at a window, biting his lip. He was younger than most of the others and, she recal ed, recently married.

She remembered that she'd seen him smile once. "May I speak freely, Lady Queen?"

"Yes, always."

"For now, Lady Queen," he said, "al ow us to continue to obey. But give us honorable instructions, Lady Queen," he said, turning a flushed face to hers. "Ask us to do honorable things, so that we may have the honor of obeying you."

It was as Po had said, then. They needed a new leader.

SHE WENT TO the art gal ery. She was looking for Hava, though she didn't know why. There was something about Hava's fear that she wanted to be near, because she understood it, and something about being able to hide; something about turning into something one wasn't.

It was less dusty than it had been, and the fires were lit.

Hava seemed to be trying to turn it into a habitable place.

There was a kind of flicker in her vision that Bitterblue was becoming accustomed to, whenever Hava was hiding in plain sight, but nothing in the gal ery was flickering today.

Bitterblue sat on the floor to the side of the sculptures in the sculpture room, watching their transformations.

After some time, Hava found her there.

"Lady Queen," she said. "What's wrong?"

Considering the plain face of this girl, her strange, copper- red eyes, Bitterblue said, "I want to turn into something I'm not, Hava. Like you do, or like one of your mother's sculptures."

Hava walked to the windows beyond the sculptures, windows that looked out over the great courtyard. "I remain myself, Lady Queen," she said. "It's only other people who think I'm something I'm not. Which only reinforces, every time, the thing I am, which is a pretender."

"I'm a pretender too," said Bitterblue quietly. "Right now, I'm pretending to be the leader of Monsea."

"Hm," said Hava, pursing her lips and staring out the window. "My mother's sculptures aren't about people being what they're not either, Lady Queen, not real y. She had a way of seeing truths about people, and showing them with her sculptures. Have you ever thought of that?"

"You mean that I really am a castle," said Bitterblue dryly, "and you're a bird?"

"I knew how to fly away," Hava said, "in a sense, anytime anyone else came near. The only person I was ever myself with was my mother. Even my uncle didn't know, until recently, that I was alive. It was our way of hiding me from Leck, Lady Queen. She pretended to him that I'd died, and then, every time he or anyone else at court came near, I used my Grace to hide. I flew away," she said simply, "and Leck never knew that my Grace was the inspiration for all her sculptures."

Bitterblue's eyes locked on Hava, suddenly wondering something. Unsettled, and trying to make a more focused study of Hava's face. "Hava," she said, "who is your father?"

Hava didn't seem to hear. "Lady Queen," she said in a peculiar voice, "who is that person in the courtyard?"

"What?"

"That person," Hava said, pointing, her nose pressed to the window, speaking in the wondering sort of voice that Teddy used when he talked about books.

Joining her carefully at the glass, Bitterblue looked down and saw a sight that was all comfort: Katsa and Po in the courtyard, kissing.

"Katsa," Bitterblue breathed happily.

"Beyond Lady Katsa," said Hava impatiently.

Beyond Katsa was a close-knit group of people that Bitterblue had definitely never seen before. At the edge of the group was a woman, an elderly woman. She leaned against a younger man who stood beside her. Her coat was pale brown fur; the hat on her head was pale brown fur.

Her eyes, all at once, rose to meet Bitterblue's in the high gal ery window.

Bitterblue needed to see her hair.

Like magic, the woman pull ed off her hat and let her hair tumble down, scarlet and gold and pink, streaked with silver.

It was the woman from the hanging in the library, and Bitterblue didn't know why she was crying.

Chapter 42

THEY WERE FROM a land east of the eastern mountains, cal ed the Del s, and they came in peace.

Except that some of them were from a land to the north of the Del s cal ed Pikkia, a land that occasional y bickered with the Del s, but was currently at peace with them—or not? It was hard to follow, because Katsa was explaining it badly and none of them seemed to speak the Monsean language much at all . Bitterblue knew what language they must all speak, but the only words she could remember were cobwebs and monster. And she still seemed to be leaking tears.

"Death," she said. "Somebody fetch Death. Katsa, just for a minute, stop talking," she said, needing quiet, because something peculiar was happening here in the courtyard.

The voices, the need to understand messy things, and all the nattering—al of it was keeping her from being able to focus.

Everyone stood quietly, waiting.

Bitterblue couldn't take her eyes off the woman from the hanging. And the strangeness was coming from this woman: Bitterblue realized that now; she was changing the air somehow, changing the way Bitterblue felt. She tried to breathe easily, tried not to be overwhelmed. Tried to see the woman's individual parts instead of being invaded by . .

. her extraordinary whole. Her skin was brown and her eyes were green and her hair—Bitterblue understood the woman's hair, for she'd seen the rat pelt, but the pelt hadn't been a living, breathing woman, and it had not made her feel as if the top of her head were singing.

The air was soaked with the feeling of power being used.

"What are you doing to us?" Bitterblue whispered to the woman.

"She does understand you, Bitterblue," said Katsa, "though she doesn't speak our language. She can respond to you, but she'll only do so with your permission, for she does it mental y. It'l feel like she's in your head."

"Oh," Bitterblue said, stepping back. "No. Never."

"Al she does is communicate, Bitterblue," said Katsa gently. "She doesn't steal your thoughts, or change them."

"But she could if she wanted to," said Bitterblue, for she'd read her father's stories about a woman who looked like this and had a venomous mind. Behind her, the courtyard had fil ed with servants, with clerks, guards, Giddon, Bann, Raffin, Helda, Hava—Anna the baker, Ornik the smith.

Dyan, the gardener. Froggatt, Holt. And others filing in, and all of them staring in wonder at a woman who was standing there glowing with something.

"She doesn't want to change your thoughts, Bitterblue,"

said Katsa, "or anyone's here. And in your case, she tells me she couldn't, because you have a good, strong mind that is closed to her interference."

"I've had practice," Bitterblue said in a small , hard voice.

"How does her power work? I want to know exactly how it works."

Po broke in. "Beetle," he said, his voice hinting that she was, perhaps, being rude, "I understand you, but perhaps you'd like to greet them and bring them in out of the cold first? They've come a long way to meet you. They'd probably like to be shown to their rooms."