Bitterblue (Graceling Realm #3)(64)
Author: Kristin Cashore

"It will be decent because I'm going," Helda said. "And if I must subject myself to late-night larks in freezing climes all for the sake of decency, then Bann will suffer beside me."

This was how Bitterblue came to discover that sledding, in a nighttime snowfal , with bewildered guards standing above and the earth's most complete silence, was magical, and breathless, and conducive to a great deal of laughter.

THE NEXT NIGHT, while Bitterblue was again eating with her friends, Hava came scurrying in. "Excuse me, Lady Queen," she said, trying to catch her breath. "That Fox person just came into the art gal ery through the secret passage behind the hanging. I hid, Lady Queen, and followed her to the sculpture room. She tried to lift one of my mother's sculptures with her bare hands, Lady Queen.

She failed, of course, and when she left the gal ery, I followed her. She came nearly to your rooms, Lady Queen, then dropped down the staircase into the maze. I ran straight here."

Bitterblue jumped up from the table. "You mean that she's in the maze now?"

"Yes, Lady Queen."

Bitterblue ran for the keys. "Hava," she said, coming back and going to the hidden door, "slip down there, will you?

Quickly. Hide. See if she comes in. Don't interfere—just watch her, understand? Try to figure out what she's up to.

And We'll eat," Bitterblue instructed her friends, "and talk about nothing that matters. We'll discuss the weather and ask after each other's health."

"The worst of all of this is that I no longer think it's safe for the Council to trust Ornik," said Bann glumly, after Hava had gone. "Ornik associates with her."

"Maybe that's your worst," Bitterblue said. "My worst is that she knows about Saf and the crown, and has from the beginning. She may even know about my mother's cipher, and my father's too."

"We need trip wires, you know," said Bann. "Something for all our secret stairways, including the one Hava just went down, to alert us if anyone's spying. I'll see what I can come up with."

"Yes? Wel , it's still snowing," said Giddon, following Bitterblue's orders to speak of the mundane. "Have you been making any progress on your nausea infusion, Bann, since Raffin left?"

"It's as pukey as ever," said Bann.

Sometime later, Hava tapped on the inside door. When Bitterblue let her in, Hava reported that Fox had, indeed, entered Leck's rooms. "She has new lock picks, Lady Queen," said Hava. "She went to the sculpture of the little child—the small est in the room—and tried to lift it. She did just manage to budge it, though of course she couldn't lift it properly. Then she let it go again and stood staring at it for a while. She was thinking about something, Lady Queen.

Then she poked around the bathing room and the closet, then ran up the steps and stood with her ear to your sitting room door. And then she came back down and left the room."

"Is she a thief," said Bitterblue, "or a spy, or both? If a spy, for whom? Helda, we are having her followed, aren't we?"

"Yes, Lady Queen. But she loses her tail every night at the merchant docks. She runs along them toward Winter Bridge, then climbs under them. Her tail can't follow her under the docks, Lady Queen, for fear of getting caught under there with her."

"I'll follow her, Lady Queen," said Hava. "Let me follow her. I can go under the docks without being seen."

"It sounds dangerous, Hava," said Bitterblue. "It's cold, it's wet under the docks. It's December!"

"But I can do it, Lady Queen," Hava said. "No one can hide as I can. Please? She put her hands all over my mother's sculptures."

"Yes," said Bitterblue, remembering those same hands on her mother's embroidery. "Yes, all right, Hava, but please be careful."

ALL I WANT is a peaceful place of art, architecture, and medicine, but the edges of my control fray. There are too many people and I am exhausted. In the city, the resistance never ends. Every time I capture a mind reader, another surfaces. There is too much to erase and too much to create. Perhaps I am pleased with the glass ceilings, but the bridges aren't big enough. I'm sure they were bigger across the Winged River in the Dells. The Winged River is more regal than my river. I hate my river for this.

I had to kill the gardener. He's always made monsters for the courtyard, he's always made them as I asked, they look and act alive, but after all, they are not alive, are they? They are not real.

While I was at it, I killed Gadd too. Did I kill him too soon?

His hangings are too sad and they aren't real either, they aren't even made of monster fur. I cannot get it right. I cannot get it perfect, and I hate my own attempts. I hate this cipher. It is necessary, it seems as if it should be brilliant, but it begins to give me a headache. My hospital gives me a headache. There are too many people. I tire of deciding what they should think and feel and do.

I should have stuck with my animals in their cages. Their lack of language protects them. When I cut them, they scream, because I cannot explain to them that it doesn't hurt. They always, always know what I am doing. There is a purity in their fear, and it is such a relief to me. And it is nice to be alone with them.

There is purity in counting my knives. There is a purity some times in the hospital too, when I let the patients feel the pain. Some of them release such exquisite cries. It sounds almost as if the blood itself is screaming. The roundness of the ceiling and the dampness make for such acoustics. The walls shine black. But then the cries upset the others. The fog begins to lift from their minds and they begin to understand what they are hearing, and the men begin to understand what they are doing, and then I have to punish them, awe them, shame them, make them dread me and need me until they have forgotten, all of them, and that is so much more work than keeping them always blind.

There are those precious few I keep for myself and treat away from the hospital. There always have been.

Bellamew is one and Ashen is another. I let no one watch, unless I am making someone watch, as punishment. It is punishment to Thiel to watch me with Ashen. I do not let him touch her and sometimes I cut him. In those moments, when it is private, in my rooms, closed away, and I hold the knives, the perfection comes back for an instant. Just for an instant, peace. My lessons with my child will be this way. It will be perfect with my child.

Is it possible that Bellamew has been lying to me for eight years?

* * * * *

BITTERBLUE BEGAN TO give the translations to her friends to read first so that they could warn her of mentions of her mother, or herself. Every night, Death presented new pages. Some nights, Bitterblue couldn't bring herself to read them at all . On those nights, she asked Giddon to summarize, which he did, sitting beside her on the sofa, voice low. She chose Giddon for the job because Helda and Bann wouldn't promise not to edit out the worst parts, and Giddon would. He spoke so quietly, as if it would lessen the impact of the words. It didn't—not real y—though if he'd spoken louder, Bitterblue agreed that that would have been worse. She sat listening, with her arms tight around herself, shivering.

She worried about Death, who saw the words first and with no buffer; who labored over them for hours every day.

"Perhaps at a certain point," she said to him, not quite believing such words were coming from her own mouth, "it's enough for us to know that he was a brutal man who did mad things. Perhaps the details don't matter."

"But it's history, Lady Queen," said Death.

"But, it's not," Bitterblue said. "Not real y, not yet. In a hundred years it will be history. Now it's our own story."

"Our own story is even more important for us to know than history, Lady Queen. Aren't you trying to find answers in these books to today's questions?"

"Yes," she said, sighing. "Yes. Can you really bear to read it?"

"Lady Queen," said Death, laying his pen down and looking hard into her face. "I lived outside it for thirty-five years. For thirtyfive years I tried to learn what he was doing and why.

For me, this fil s in holes."

For Bitterblue, it was creating holes, holes in her ability to feel. Great, blank spaces where something existed that she couldn't process, because to process it would make her know too much, or make her certain she was going mad.

When she stood in the lower offices now and watched the empty-eyed bustle of clerks and guards, Darby, Thiel, and Rood, she understood a thing Runnemood had said one time when she'd pushed too hard. Was the truth worth losing one's sanity?

"I don't want to do this anymore," Bitterblue said one night to Giddon, still shivering. "You have a beautiful voice, do you know that? If we continue with this, your voice'l be ruined for me. I must either read his words myself, or hear them from someone who's not my friend."

Giddon hesitated. "I do it because I'm your friend, Lady Queen."

"I know," Bitterblue said. "But I hate it, and I know you do too, and I don't like that we've developed a nightly routine of doing something hateful together."

"I won't agree to you doing it alone," Giddon said stubbornly.

"Then it's a good thing I don't need your permission."

"Take a break from it, Lady Queen," said Bann, coming to sit on her other side. "Please. Read a bigger pile once a week, instead of small , torturous bits every day. We'll continue to read it with you."

This seemed a promising idea—until the week had passed, and the day came to read seven days' worth of accumulated translation. After two pages, Bitterblue couldn't go on.

"Stop," Giddon said. "Just stop reading. It's making you sick."

"I believe he preferred female victims," Bitterblue said, "because in addition to the other mad experiments he forced them to endure, he was performing experiments that related to pregnancy and babies."

"This is not for you to read," Giddon said. "This is for some other person who wasn't one of the players in this tale to read, and then tell you the things a queen needs to know.

Death can do it as he's translating."

"I believe he raped them," Bitterblue said, alone, cold, not listening, "al of them in his hospital. I believe he raped my mother."

Giddon yanked the papers from her hands and threw them across the room. Jumping at the unexpectedness of this, Bitterblue saw him clearly as she hadn't before, saw him towering over her, mouth hard, eyes flashing, and realized he was furious. Her vision came into focus and the room fil ed itself in around her. She heard the fire crackling, the silence of Bann and Helda, at the table, watching, tense, unhappy. The room smel ed like wood fires. She pull ed a blanket around herself. She was not alone.

"Cal me by my name," she said quietly to Giddon.

"Bitterblue," he said just as quietly, "I beg you. Please stop reading the psychotic ramblings of your father. They are doing you harm."