Winterkeep

by Kristin Cashore

  “So you have to stand on that square?” Lovisa said, not understanding.

  “It’s cold in here,” he said. “The air swoops down the staircase and under the door. Every time someone comes in, it’s freezing.”

  Lovisa noticed the way he was shivering, hunching his shoulders to his ears. Looking up the stairs, she saw the fox, his eyes glinting through the banister, serving as Viri’s guard. If she or anyone brought Viri warm clothing or socks, he would end up with an even harsher punishment.

  Something inside Lovisa went hard and certain. “I’m going to check on you,” she said, “soon.”

  Then, a little frightened of her own fury, she turned toward her father’s library.

  * * *

  —

  Inside the library, Lovisa stood like a girl made of electric confusion. She hardly saw the room around her. She only saw Viri on his square, and the queen trapped in the attic room. She touched the key tucked against her breast.

  Lovisa understood that she was here to get the queen out of her prison.

  But how? What could she do? Make a scene at dinner? It might’ve worked at the dinner with the Monsean delegation, but it was too late for that now.

  What, then? The fox knew she was home, which meant that her parents knew too, and would be hypervigilant about keeping her away from the attic. Should she try to incapacitate her mother somehow while her father was in bed, then run for the attic? No. What was she going to do, attack her own mother?

  Lovisa went to her father’s desk and began yanking the top drawers open, looking for some clue that would make sense of everything and tell her what to do. What had those Monseans been looking for? She found pieces of graphite, pens, envelopes, a button, a neat little pile of unpaid bills. Another neat pile of Keepish cash. No clues.

  When she reached the few small panels that she knew were the fronts of secret drawers, she focused on a childhood memory. She’d pretended to fall asleep in Benni’s big armchair once, then peeked through her eyelashes as he’d felt around inside one of the top drawers with a deliberation that had interested her. As she’d watched, another, handleless drawer had popped open nearby.

  Lovisa took a careful breath. After a minute or so of gentle fiddling inside the top drawers, a click sounded. One of the panels sprang forward, just enough for Lovisa to slip a finger inside. Quite satisfied with herself, she pulled the hidden drawer open, then cringed in horror as it made a terrible screeching sound. Quickly, she peeked into the drawer, saw that it contained some papers and jewelry, swept everything out, and shoved it into her pocket. She slid the noisy drawer closed and ran to the armchair, where she sat with her legs curled up around her, trying to look young and calm and innocent.

  After a minute passed during which no one came, Lovisa reached into her pocket and pooled the things in her lap. A ring with a large red stone was familiar, and looked like her father’s style. The rest were Benni’s identification book and his checkbook. She opened the identification book idly, wishing for a clue for what to do.

  Katu Cavenda’s name stared back at her. It wasn’t Benni’s identification book; it was Katu’s.

  With the feeling draining out of her body, she opened the checkbook and found that it was Katu’s too.

  And now, of course, she remembered why she recognized the ring. She’d never once seen her uncle without it. She supposed she would never see her uncle again.

  Lovisa’s mind was working now. She knew what she was going to do.

  * * *

  —

  First she took care of her brothers.

  Running back to the foyer, she glanced up the stairs and saw that the fox was gone.

  “Viri,” she said to the little boy whose freckled face lit up at the sight of her. “Where are Erita and Vikti?”

  “In the schoolroom, I think,” he said. “Mother punished them too.”

  “Listen, I want you to do something naughty. I can’t promise that you won’t get in trouble, though. Will you do it anyway?”

  Viri tilted his head at her, like a curious fox. “Is it for you?” he asked, his eyes glowing at her like dark stars.

  “Yes.”

  “You look kind of wild, Lovisa.”

  “Yes,” she said forcefully. “I want you to leave your punishment square and run up to get your brothers. Then I want all three of you to grab your coats, sneak outside, and wait there, someplace where no one will notice you. Stay outside, all right? And keep staying outside. Don’t go back inside, any of you, for at least an hour. And put on some shoes!”

  “What’s going to happen?” he asked.

  “You’ll see,” she said, then thought of Viri’s games and books, of his small, grim life; inexplicably, of the special pieces she loved from Mari’s City board. “On your way out, fill your pockets with your favorite things, okay?”

  “You mean like snacks?”

  “No, like your favorite treasures,” she said, ashamed when her voice choked up. “And your favorite Keeper drawings. Tell Vikti to bring his new telescope. But hurry.”

  Viri stared at her in astonishment. “Are we all running away together?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “Go now, okay? Don’t let anyone see you!”

  He stepped out of his square and scampered up the stairs with an expression of thrilled determination, his bare feet slapping against marble.

  Please, thought Lovisa. Let me do this right.

  Then she returned to the library, jammed a chair under the doorknob, and got started.

  It was a library, which meant that it was full of tinder. It was also connected to her mother’s study by the narrow flight of stairs that started behind the swinging bookcase, and Ferla’s study was full of silbercow oil. If Lovisa was going to start a small, distracting fire, the staircase was probably a good location.

  She ran to the shelves near the swinging bookcase and began pulling books down at random, opening them, tearing out pages and crumpling them, but quietly. Then she began carrying things up the steps on tiptoe and piling them gently, soundlessly, outside her mother’s door: the crumpled paper, the logs and tinder stacked beside the fire, every lamp in the room. There were so many lamps; it took several trips. She poured some of the lamp oil over her mountain of torn pages and logs, and some onto the floor. She tried to cast oil across her mother’s door, but it was hard to know where it landed. Lovisa was shaking with the desperation of having no idea what she was doing. She’d never lit a fire before, not even in a fireplace. Also, she could hear her parents’ muffled voices, arguing in Ferla’s study.

  “Why are you here?” said Ferla. “Get out of my study. Go back to bed!”

  “The Estillan envoy is coming to dinner,” said Benni. “I want my banker’s box.”

  “Oh, no you don’t,” said Ferla. “You’ll leave that banker’s box here until he comes. I don’t trust you with it. Get out. Get out!”

  Lovisa heard a door slam and fled downstairs again, worrying that her father would come to his library next. That stupid banker’s box had been the primary mystery of her life once. Now she didn’t care what was inside it. In the library, she went to the fire, took the ash shovel in one hand and the tongs in the other. Digging into the base of the fire, she scooped bright embers onto the shovel. Then she chose the most boisterously burning log from the fire and grabbed it with her tongs. It was too heavy to lift with one hand. Awkwardly, she supported it with the same hand holding the shovel.

  The journey back up the staircase with a flaming log and a shovelful of burning embers was not Lovisa’s best or proudest moment. Focused intently on the log, which was trying to slip out of the tongs, she kept forgetting to hold the shovel straight. Embers slid onto the staircase as she climbed, landing on her own shoes and the edges of her coat. Lovisa had never appreciated the efficacy of a flue before. The stairway became so thick with smoke that
she was choking by the time she reached the top, where she had no time to make a careful choice about positioning. She poured the embers haphazardly onto a pile of crumpled paper, placed the log somewhere on the mess, turned, and ran down the stairs again. She heard a sharp sizzle behind her as a flame touched oil. There was a roar, like a wind. Then she burst back into the library, gasping, nose pouring, eyes streaming, and remembered that in an earlier life, ten minutes ago, she’d had the idea to cover her nose and mouth with a wet cloth before lighting the house on fire, then forgotten.

  It was done now. She closed the swinging bookcase, wanting to cut off the smoke—then cracked it open, remembering that fires needed air. She tried to peek into the stairwell, heard snaps and hisses and growls above. Saw light. The fire seemed to be growing. The library, dark now with only the fireplace to illuminate it, hung with a haze of smoke. Lovisa ran to the main library door and listened there too, waiting to hear anything out in the corridor: shouts, cries of alarm, any sign that anyone had noticed that the second floor of the house was burning. Be outside, she thought to her brothers. Be outside. Then she thought of the guards, the attendants and maids, the cooking staff; then turned that part of her brain off. There were many ways out of the house and she’d lit the fire in a place that wouldn’t trap anyone. Everyone could get out, except the queen. Everyone would get out, and stay out, or else they would crowd around her mother’s study trying to extinguish the fire. Both possibilities would give Lovisa time to get to the queen.

  It seemed to take forever. Wasn’t Ferla still in her study? Mustn’t there be smoke streaming under her door? Lovisa was coughing badly. With sudden forethought, she went to the desk and shoved the Keepish cash into her pockets, next to Katu’s papers and ring.

  Then, instantly, everything happened at once. A cry came from somewhere upstairs, then more cries. Ferla’s voice, the shouts of guards. People running, doors slamming. A guard downstairs began yelling.

  And then, somewhere above, there was an explosion. It was stunning. The whole house shook; plaster rained down on Lovisa from the ceiling. A moment later, a strange, metallic smell filled the air.

  Lovisa didn’t understand it, but it didn’t matter. Grabbing the ash shovel, she ran to the window farthest from the front of the house. The shovel was solid and heavy in her hands. She raised it like a cudgel and smashed it through a windowpane, unconcerned about the guards. No one was going to investigate a tinkle of glass while the house was exploding.

  As she brushed the jagged edges of glass away from the window grilles, someone—her father—tried the main library door and called her name. In a panic, she stuck one leg through the grille, then the other, then pushed, let go, dropped to the ground. The cold was shocking after the fire, the air so pure that she felt herself almost drowning in it. She ran, circling the back of the house. The house did not look right. Part of the second floor—the place where her mother’s study had been—was a black, gaping hole. She couldn’t think about it now; she kept running. When she reached the tree on the house’s other side, she threw her shovel down. Bark scraped skin from her hands but she climbed fast and hard, thinking of Queen Bitterblue and the need not to think about anything else. The trellis was easier to scale than the tree. The window opened smoothly. Lovisa dropped inside.

  In the house’s warmth, she raced down corridors, straining her ears, wondering if it was only her imagination that the air here, far from the source of the fire, was smoky. She’d inhaled so much smoke already that it was hard to tell. Far away, she heard more shouts. Something else too, something she would have dismissed as wind in the eaves if she hadn’t had a horrifying suspicion that it was the crackle and roar of a house on fire.

  Small fire, she thought, almost crying. I wanted a small, distracting fire!

  No one met her as she ran to the attic stairs. No guards had been dispatched to this part of the house to rescue the queen. What must it be like to be trapped in that dark, smelly room, hungry and weak, as the walls grew hot and the air filled with smoke? Her parents had chosen that fate for another human being.

  At the top of the attic steps, Lovisa opened the door and burst across the cavernous space, reaching into her shirt for the key. Her hands shaking hard, she unlocked the queen’s door, then pushed into the room to find the queen standing there before her, as if waiting. Queen Bitterblue wielded the letter opener in one hand like a sword, a calm, ferocious expression on her face.

  “You,” said the queen, in Keepish. “I didn’t think you were coming.”

  Lovisa tried to say something in response, but began coughing uncontrollably. She grabbed the queen’s arm and pulled her out of the room and down the stairs. In the third-floor corridor, the smoke stung the back of Lovisa’s throat and the distant roar was louder.

  “Did you do this?” asked Bitterblue.

  “I had to,” said Lovisa, almost sobbing, pulling Bitterblue along corridors and around corners, stumbling, rushing. Both of them were coughing now. “Are you strong enough to climb?”

  “If climbing is necessary,” said the queen, “I can climb.”

  Lovisa pulled the queen into the room with the broken lock. “We have to get you out that window, down a trellis, down a tree, then over a wall.” She dragged the window open. “I should probably go first, so I can stand guard while you follow. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said the queen, tucking her letter opener into one of the pockets of her pajamas. Her pockets hung heavily and her feet were bare. Lovisa couldn’t worry about that now. Scrambling through the window, down the trellis, down the tree, she landed solidly on both feet, right beside the shovel. Grabbing it, she held it tight, feeling strong suddenly, and desperate, and determined. Then she looked up to measure the progress of the queen, who was climbing out of the window more slowly than anyone had ever climbed out of a window.

  “Hurry!” she called in a whispering kind of yell, then set her mind to figuring out the next step. Where should they go? Whom could she trust? Who would even believe that her parents were kidnappers and murderers?

  Her mother’s fox rounded the house and ran across Lovisa’s feet.

  Newly terrified, Lovisa spun around and saw Ferla bearing down on her, fists hard, eyes enormous. Somehow, Lovisa maintained the presence of mind not to glance upward and betray the location of the queen.

  “Lovisa!” her mother cried, reaching out to her. “Come away from there!” Ferla tried to grab at Lovisa with hands like claws and Lovisa took a mighty swing with the shovel.

  Ferla slumped to the ground. Blood seeped from her temple, black in the light from the flaming house. Then suddenly, a phenomenal explosion above lit up the sky like the sun.

  The airship, Lovisa thought leadenly, craning her neck, understanding. I destroyed the airship. Fire from the explosion shot across the sky. Disbelieving, Lovisa heard another explosion in the distance, saw another ball of light, and understood that she’d just destroyed the Gravlas’ airship too. She’d probably set Kep Gravla’s house on fire. I killed my mother, she thought. I destroyed everything. It was supposed to be a small fire! Then, with dawning comprehension, I’m going to prison for the rest of my life.

  Bitterblue was beside her now, saying something urgently, holding on to Lovisa, supporting Lovisa as Lovisa stumbled. The queen smelled terrible up close. It woke Lovisa up.

  “I killed my mother,” Lovisa said.

  Bitterblue reached down, putting her fingers to the pulse at Ferla’s throat. “Her heart is beating,” she said.

  A terrible relief crashed against Lovisa, followed by certainty. “If she’s alive, she’s going to look for us.”

  “Where can we go?” said Bitterblue. “Whom do you trust?”

  “I don’t know!” Mari flashed across Lovisa’s mind. Then Nev, but Nev was already gone. “I trust two people,” Lovisa said. “One, I refuse to endanger. The other went north today.”

  “I wan
t to go north,” said the queen firmly.

  “North?” Lovisa repeated dumbly. “No. We need to bring you somewhere safe and make an announcement that you’re alive in front of lots of people. Then I need to run.”

  “If it would make you safe for us to announce my safety, then that’s certainly what we should do,” said the queen. “But you’ve destroyed a lot of property and hurt your mother, and I’m not inclined to trust anyone either. I’ve learned—from an informant—that my friends have gone north. I think our next move would benefit from some strategic thought, someplace out of the way. I’m inclined to go north.” The queen was speaking calmly, patting her pockets to check on her possessions. “Do you suppose I should take your mother’s coat, and her shoes?” she added. “She won’t freeze, will she?”

  Tears were running down Lovisa’s face. “Her fox will find her soon,” she said, bending down and beginning the unpleasant task of stripping things from Ferla’s insensate body, which was heavy, and seemed dead even if it wasn’t. When she began to sob at how awful the job was, the queen took over, pulling off Ferla’s shoes and coat, bundling herself into them. They fit her well.

  “Give me that,” said Bitterblue, for Lovisa still carried the ash shovel in one tight fist, as if it were an extension of her arm. It didn’t seem possible to put it down. The queen wrenched it from her grip, inspected its edge. Walked to a nearby window bright with flames, used it to stab through the window glass, then threw the shovel inside.

  “Have you decided what’s best for us to do?” she said as she came back. “Lovisa Cavenda,” she added more gently, taking the girl’s arm. “That’s your name, right? You’re Katu’s niece. We have to move.”

  Katu. Lovisa couldn’t bear the reminder of Katu. “I have a friend in the north,” she said numbly. “I miss her.”

  “We’ll go to her,” said Bitterblue. “Please, lead the way.”

  As Lovisa led the queen to the easy rocks at the back of the property, she could hardly believe she was leaving her own mother like that, crumpled on the ground. At the wall, she showed the queen where to put her hands and feet. The queen took forever to climb. Finally, Lovisa started up behind her, then froze in alarm as that guard, the sister of the one she’d hurt, came running around the corner of the house. The guard stopped. Gaped at Lovisa, gaped at the queen. The guard saw Ferla lying on the ground.