Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)(63)
Author: Kristin Cashore

"It means monster, Lady Queen, or beast. Aberration, mutant."

"Like him," Bitterblue whispered.

"Yes, Lady Queen. Like him."

"The top line is the regular alphabet," said Bitterblue. "The six subsequent alphabets began with the six letters that spel the word ozhaleegh."

"Yes."

"To decipher the first letter of the first word in a passage, we use alphabet number one. For the second letter, alphabet number two, and so on. For the seventh letter, we go back to alphabet number one."

"Yes, Lady Queen. You understand it perfectly."

"Isn't it rather complicated for a journal, Death? I use a similar ciphering technique in my letters to King Ror, but my letters are brief, and perhaps I write one or two a month."

"It wouldn't have been terribly difficult to write, Lady Queen, but it would have been a tangle to try to reread. It does seem a bit extreme, especial y since presumably no one else spoke the Del ian language."

"He overdid everything," said Bitterblue.

"Here, let's take the first sentence of this book," said Death, pulling the closest book forward and copying down the first line:

"Deciphered, it reads—"

Both Death and Bitterblue scribbled on Death's blotter.

Then they compared their results: "Are those real words?" asked Bitterblue.

"Yah weensah kahlah ahfrohsahsheen ohng khoh nayzh yah hahntaylayn dahs khoh neetayt hoht," D eath said aloud. "Yes, Lady Queen. "It means . . ." He screwed his lips tight, thinking. "'The winter gala approaches and we haven't the candles we need.' I've had to make some guesses about verb endings, Lady Queen, and their sentence structure differs from ours, but I believe that's accurate."

Touching her deciphered scribbles, Bitterblue whispered the strange Del ian words. In places, they sounded like her own language, but not quite: yah weensah kahlah, the winter gala. They felt like bubbles in her mouth: beautiful, breathy bubbles. "Now that you've cracked the cipher," she said, "should you try to memorize all thirty-five volumes before you start translating?"

"In order to memorize so much, Lady Queen, I'd need to decipher as I read. As long as I'm doing that, I may as wel complete the translation as wel , so that you have something to look at."

"I hope it isn't thirty-five books about party supplies," she said.

"I'll spend the afternoon translating, Lady Queen," he said, "and bring you the results."

HE ENTERED HER sitting room that night, while she was eating a late dinner with Helda, Giddon, and Bann.

"Are you all right, Death?" Bitterblue asked him, for he looked—wel , he looked old and miserable again, without the glow of triumph he'd had earlier in the day.

He handed her a small sheaf of paper wrapped in leather. "I leave it to you, Lady Queen," he said grimly.

"Oh," Bitterblue said, understanding. "Not party supplies, then?"

"No, Lady Queen."

"Death, I'm sorry. You know you don't have to do this."

"I do, Lady Queen," he said, turning to leave. "You do too."

A moment later, the outer doors closed behind him.

Looking at the leather in her hands, she wished that he hadn't gone so soon.

Wel , none of it would ever end if she was too afraid for it to begin. She pull ed at the tie, pushed the cover aside, and read the opening line.

Little girls are even more perfect when they bleed.

Bitterblue slapped the cover over the page again. For a moment, she sat there. Then, raising her eyes to each of her friends in turn, she said, "Wil you stay with me while I read this?"

"Yes, of course," was the response.

She carried the pages to the sofa, sat herself down, and read.

Little girls are even more perfect when they bleed. They are such a comfort to me when my other experiments go wrong.

I am trying to determine if Graces reside in the eyes. I have fighters and mind readers, and it is a simple matter of switching their eyes, then seeing whether their Graces have changed. But they keep dying. And the mind readers are so troublesome, too often understanding what is happening, so that I must gag them and restrain them before they spread their understanding to the others. Female fighter Gracelings are not limitless, and it infuriates me that I must waste them this way. My healers say it is blood loss. They say not to conduct so many experiments simultaneously on one person. But tell me, when a woman is lying on a table in her perfection, how am I not to experiment?

Sometimes I feel that I am doing all of it wrong. I have not made this kingdom into what I know it can be. If I could be allowed my art, then I would not have these head aches that feel as if my head is splitting open. All I want is to surround myself with the beautiful things that I have lost, but my artists won't be controlled like the others.

I tell them what they want to do and half of them lose their talent completely, hand me work that is garbage, and stand there proud and empty, certain they've produced a masterpiece. The other half cannot work at all and go mad, becoming useless to me. And then there are those very few, those one, those two who do the literal of what I instruct, but imbue it with some genius, some terrible truth, so that it is more beautiful than what I asked for or imagined, and undermines me.

Gadd created a hanging of monsters killing a man and I swear that the man in the hanging is me. Gadd says not, but I know what I feel when I look at it. How did he do it? Bellamew is a world of problems unto herself; she will not take instruction at all. I told her to make a sculpture of my fire-haired beauty and it began as such, then turned into a sculpture of Ashen in which Ashen has too much strength and feeling. She made a sculpture of my child and when it looks at me, I am convinced that it pities me. She will not leave off sculpting these infuriating transformations. Their work mocks my smallness. But I cannot turn away because it is so beautiful.

It is a new year. I will think about killing Gadd this year.

A new year is a time for reflection, and really, what I ask for is so simple. But I cannot kill Bellamew yet. There is something in her mind that I want, and my experiments show that minds cannot live without bodies. She is lying to me about something. I know it.

Somehow, she has found the strength to lie to me; and until I know the nature of this lie, I cannot be done with her.

My artists cause me more grief than they are worth.

It has been a hard lesson to learn, that greatness requires suffering.

Men are hanging lamps from the frames of the courtyard ceilings in preparation for the winter gala. They can be so stupid with me in their heads that it's insufferable. Three fell because they'd barely secured the ends of their rope ladder. Two died. One is in the hospital and will live for some time, I think. Perhaps, if he is mobile, I can involve him in the experiments with the others.

This was the sum of what Death had given her. He'd done a neat job of it, copying a Del ian line and then working out the translation just beneath it, so that she could see both, and perhaps begin to learn some of the Del ian vocabulary.

At the table, Bann and Helda conversed quietly about the problem of factions in Estil , noble versus citizen—with interjections from Giddon, who was dripping single drops of water into an extremely ful glass, waiting to see which drop would cause the water to spil over the edge. From across the table, Bann tossed a bean. It plopped itself neatly into Giddon's glass and caused a deluge.

"I can't believe you just did that!" said Giddon. "You brute."

"You're two of the largest children I've ever known," scolded Helda.

"I was doing science," Giddon said. "He threw a bean."

"I was testing the impact of a bean upon water," Bann said.

"That's not even a thing."

"Perhaps I'll test the impact of a bean upon your beautiful white shirtfront," said Bann, with a threatening wave of a bean. Then both of them noticed that Bitterblue was watching. They turned their grins upon her, which was like a bath of sil iness for her, a bath to clean away the dirty, crawling, panicky feeling she'd gotten from Leck's words.

"How bad was it?" asked Giddon.

"I don't want to ruin your good moods," said Bitterblue.

This earned her a look of mild reproach from Giddon. And so she did what she most wanted to do: Held it out for him to take. Coming to sit beside her on the sofa, he read it through. Bann and Helda, coming to sit in armchairs, read it next. No one seemed inclined to speak.

Final y, Bitterblue said, "Wel , at any rate, it doesn't tell me why people in my city are kill ing truthseekers."

"No," said Helda grimly.

"This book begins at the new year," Bitterblue said, "which supports Saf's theory that each book chronicles a year of his reign."

"Is Death deciphering them out of order, Lady Queen?"

asked Bann. "If Bel amew is making sculptures of you and Queen Ashen, then Leck's married, you've been born, and this is a book from late in his reign."

"I don't know that they're labeled in any way that would make it easy to put them in order," Bitterblue said.

"Maybe it'l be less upsetting to read them without having to mark the particular progression of his abuses," Giddon said quietly. "What was Bel amew's secret, do you suppose?"

"I don't know," Bitterblue said. "The location of Hava? It seems like he had a particular interest in Gracelings, and girls."

"I fear this will be just as horrible for you as the embroidery, Lady Queen," said Helda.

Bitterblue had no response to that either. Beside her, Giddon sat with his head thrown back, eyes closed.

"When's the last time you left the castle grounds, Lady Queen?" he asked without moving.

Bitterblue sent her mind back. "The night that wretched woman broke my arm."

"That's almost two months ago, isn't it?"

Yes, it was. Two months, and Bitterblue was a bit depressed thinking about it.

"There's sledding on the hil that leads up to the ramparts of the castle's western wal ," Giddon said. "Did you know that?"

"Sledding? What are you talking about?"

"The snow is dry and fine, Lady Queen," said Giddon, sitting up, "and people have been sledding. No one'l be there now. I expect it's wel -enough lit. Does your fear of heights extend to sledding?"

"How should I know? I've never been sledding!"

"Get up, Bann," said Giddon, whacking Bann's arm.

"I'm not going sledding at eleven o'clock at night," said Bann with finality.

"Oh, yes you are," said Helda significantly.

"Helda," said Giddon, "it's not that I don't want Bann's involuntary company, but if, as you seem to be implying, it's not decent for the queen to go sledding with one unmarried man in the middle of the night, then how is it decent for her to go sledding with two?"