Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)(45)
Author: Kristin Cashore

"Yes," Helda said, breaking the seam of Bitterblue's sleeve and easing the garment over the cast. She'd had to sew Bitterblue into her dress that morning. "I've a few ideas, Lady Queen, to do with open sleeves and buttons. Sit down, my dear. Don't even move; I'll untie this scarf and deal with all these underthings. I'll put you into your shift."

"No," Bitterblue said. "No shift."

"Far be it from me, Lady Queen, to stop you if you wish to sleep with nothing on, but you have a small fever. I do believe you'll be more comfortable with an extra layer of warmth."

She wasn't going to fight with Helda about the shift, because she didn't want Helda to suspect her reason for not wanting it. But, oh, how much she ached, and how wearying to add removing the rutting shift to the list of impossible tasks she was going to have to complete in order to sneak out tonight. When Helda began to pull her hairpins out and unravel her hair, Bitterblue stopped herself again from arguing, and said, "Would you braid it in one long braid for me, please, Helda?"

Final y, Helda was gone, the lamps were extinguished, and Bitterblue lay on her right side in bed, throbbing so mightily that she wondered if it was possible for one small queen in one big bed to start an earthquake.

Well. No point in delaying.

Sometime later, with gasping breath and a pounding head, Bitterblue left her rooms and began the long trek through corridors and down stairways. She wouldn't think about her one-armedness, or the lack of knives in her sleeves. There were a great many things she wouldn't think about tonight; she would trust to luck and hope she encountered no one.

Then, in the great courtyard, a person stepped out of the shad ows and stood in her path. He let off gleams of light, softly visible in the torches, as he always did.

"Please don't make me stop you," Po said. It wasn't a joke or a warning. It was a true plea. "I will if I have to, but it'l only make both of us more sick."

"Oh, Po," she said, then went to him and hugged him with her one good arm.

He put his arm around her uninjured side, held her tight, and sighed, slowly, into her hair, balancing himself against her.

When she rested her ear against his chest, she could hear his flying heartbeat. Slowly, it calmed. He said, "Are you determined to go out?"

"I want to tell Saf and Teddy about Runnemood," she said.

"I want to ask if anything's changed with the crown, and I need to tell Saf again that I'm sorry."

"Wil you wait until tomorrow, and let me send someone to bring them to you?"

It was bliss, the very idea of being all owed to turn around and go back to her bed. "Wil you do it early?"

"Yes. will you sleep, so that when they come, it won't exhaust you to talk to them?"

"Yes," she said. "Al right."

"Al right," he said, sighing again above her. "When Madlen stepped out for a moment today, Beetle, I followed the tunnel under the east wal ."

"What? Po, you'll never get healthy!"

Po snorted. "Yes, we should all take your advice on such matters. It starts at a door behind a hanging, in an east corridor on the ground floor. It lets out into a teeny, dark all eyway in the east city, near the base of Winged Bridge."

"Do you think he escaped into the east city, then?"

"I suppose so," Po said. "I'm sorry my range doesn't extend that far. And I'm sorry I never took time to talk to him and pick up that something was wrong. I haven't been much use to you since I got here."

"Po. You've been il , and before that, you were busy. We'll find him, and then you can talk to him."

He didn't respond, just rested his head on her hair.

She asked, once, whispering, "Have you heard anything from Katsa?"

He shook his head no.

"Are you ready for her to come back?"

"I'm not ready for anything," he said. "But that doesn't mean I don't want things to happen."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"I want her to come back. Is that a good enough answer?"

Yes.

"To bed?" he said.

Yes, all right.

BEFORE FALLING ASLEEP, she read a fragment of embroidery.

Thiel reaches his limit every day yet goes on. Perhaps only because I beg him. Most would rather forget and obey unthinking than face truth of mad world Leck tries to create.

Tries and, I think, sometimes fails. He destroyed sculptures in his rooms today. Why? Also took his favorite sculptor Bel amew away. We'll never see her again. Success at destruction. But failure at something, for he cannot be satisfied. Fits of temper.

He's too interested in Bitterblue. I must get her away. That's why I beg Thiel to hold on.

Chapter 26

"I'M SURPRISED TO see you," Bitterblue said the next morning to Rood as she entered her tower office. He was quiet and grim in the absence of his brother, but not meek, not shaking. Clearly not in the throes of a nervous episode.

"I've had a bad twenty-four hours, Lady Queen," he said quietly. "I won't pretend otherwise. But Thiel came to me last night and impressed upon me how much I'm needed right now."

When Rood suffered, his suffering was present and material; he didn't hide behind emptiness. It was a frankness that made Bitterblue want to trust him. "How much of this did you know?" she ventured.

"I haven't been my brother's confidant for some years, Lady Queen," he said. "Frankly, it's best that it was Thiel he encountered in the hal s that night. He might have walked right past me and never said a word, and it was his speaking that saved your life."

"Has the Monsean Guard questioned you about where he might have gone, Rood?"

"Indeed, Lady Queen," he said. "I fear I was useless to them. I, my wife, my sons, and my grandchildren are his only living family, Lady Queen, and the castle is the only home we've ever known. He and I grew up here, you know, Lady Queen. Our parents were royal healers."

"I see." This man who tiptoed around cringing at everything had a wife, sons, and grandchildren? Were they joys for him? Did he eat with them every night and wake up with them in the morning, and did they comfort him when he was il ? Runnemood seemed so cold and aloof in contrast.

Bitterblue couldn't imagine having a sibling and walking past that person blindly in the hal s.

"Do you have family, Darby?" she asked her yell ow-green- eyed adviser the next time he came rattling up the stairs.

"I had family once," he responded, wrinkling his nose in distaste.

"You . . ." Bitterblue hesitated. "You weren't fond of them, Darby?"

"It's more that I haven't thought of them in some time, Lady Queen."

She was tempted to ask Darby what he did think of, ever, while he was running around like a manic apparatus designed for dispensing paperwork. "I confess I'm surprised to see you in the offices today too, Darby."

Darby looked into her eyes and held them, which startled her, because she couldn't remember him ever having done that before. She saw then how dreadful he looked, his eyes bloodshot and too wide, as if he were forcing them open. A tremor in the muscles of his face that she hadn't noticed before. "Thiel threatened me, Lady Queen," he said. Then he handed her one paper and one folded note, swept up her outgoing pile, and flipped through it with an expression as if he'd like to punish any piece of paper in the stack that was not in perfect order. Bitterblue imagined him poking holes in the papers with a letter opener, then holding them too close to the fire while they screamed.

"You are an odd bird, Darby," she said aloud.

"Hmph," Darby said, then left her alone. Being in her tower office without Thiel gave her a strange sense of suspension, as if she were waiting for the workday to begin. For Thiel to walk back in from whatever errand he was on and keep her company. How furi ous she was with him for doing something that had forced her to send him away.

The piece of paper Darby had brought listed the results of Runnemood's latest literacy survey. In both castle and city, the statistics hovered around eighty percent. Of course, there was no earthly reason to believe that they were accurate.

The note, written in graphite, was in Po's large, careful hand. Briefly, it told her that Teddy and Saf had been summoned and would meet her in her library alcove at noon.

She went to an east-facing window, worried, suddenly, about how Teddy was going to manage the trip. Leaning her forehead against the glass, she breathed through pain and dizziness. The sky was the color of steel, a late-autumn sky, though it was only October. The bridges stood like mirages, gorgeously grand as they reached across the river. Squinting, she understood what was happening with the air that seemed to change color and move. Snowflakes.

Not a storm, just a spitting, the first of the season.

Later, when she left for the library, she stopped in the lower offices to look out over all the clerks who worked here every day. She supposed they numbered thirty-five or forty at any time, depending on . . . wel , she didn't really know what it depended on. Where did her clerks go when they weren't here? Did they march around the castle checking on . . .

things? A castle was chock-ful of things to check on, wasn't it?

Bitterblue made a mental note to ask Madlen whether the medications she was taking for pain were dul ing her intel ect or whether she actual y was stupid. A youngish clerk named Froggatt, perhaps thirty years old with bouncy dark hair, stood bent over a table nearby. He straightened himself and asked her if she needed anything.

"No, thank you, Froggatt," she said.

"We're all extremely relieved that you survived the attack, Lady Queen," said Froggatt.

Surprised, she looked into his face, then studied the other faces in the room. They'd all stood, of course, when she'd walked in, and now stared back at her, waiting for her to go, so that they could get back to work. Were they relieved? Real y? She knew their names, but nothing about their lives, their personalities, or their histories, other than that they had all worked in her father's administration, for varying lengths of time, depending on their ages. If one of them disappeared and no one told her, she might never notice. If told, how much would she feel?

And it wasn't relief she saw in their faces. It was a blankness, as if they didn't see her, as if their lives existed only inside the paperwork each of them was waiting to return to.

NO ONE WAS in her library alcove except for the woman in the hanging and the young, castle-turning version of herself.

It seemed ironic, somehow, to stand before the sculpture in the state Bitterblue was in now. The sculpture girl's arm was turning into a rock tower with soldiers, strengthening itself, becoming its own protection. Bitterblue's real-life arm was affixed to her side with a sling. Like a reflection in a depressing, distorted mirror, she thought.